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Amy Lowell was the daughter of a wealthy Boston family, and a difficult child. She got engaged at twenty-three but the man reneged, and after that she went to Egypt for the "obesity cure" consisting of tomatoes and asparagus. It nearly killed her. At twenty-eight she resolved to become a poet and for several years it went poorly. But in 1914 she traveled to London, met Ezra Pound, and took over the Imagist movement, publishing at her own expense an annual anthology of the poets she liked. Pound called her version "Amygism", but Lowell was not one to be deterred.
She was five feet tall, overweight, slept until three in the afternoon in a bed with 16 pillows, and then worked through the night with two secretaries handling her correspondence. She wore men's suits, stopped the clocks in her room, draped the mirrors, smoked cigars, and had a "Boston marriage" with another woman who loved her and organized her life. By 1925 Lowell had become a wonderful poet as well as a powerful promoter, and the year she died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at fifty-one, she received the Pulitzer Prize.
America's first published poet, Anne Bradstreet immigrated with her husband at the age of eighteen and lived the hard pilgrim life in Boston, Ipswich, and Andover. In the two hundred years from 1630 when she arrived until 1826 when Whittier began to publish in local newspapers, she stands alone among the great poets, unread except by a few friends, driven by her intelligence, honesty, and capacity for deep feelings. She bore eight children, suffered smallpox and tuberculosis, and supported her husband, Governor of the colony, who was often away from home. But she never lost her strength, her curiosity, or her faith. Even when her house and books were burned in a fire, or when a child died. "I came into this Country," she wrote, "where I found a new World and new manners at which my heart rose."
Ben Jonson started as an actor, but he always wanted to write. His early plays were unsuccessful and his hot temper landed him in prison several times, once for manslaughter. Even his best plays got him in trouble for lewdness, slander, and treason against the crown. Finally, he gave up, having made less than £200 on the lot. He was appointed the first Poet Laureate, and began writing masques and public verse for royal occasions and memorials. His art declined, but his wit and influence continued, and when he died in 1637 his remains were buried in Westminster Abby.
Carl Sandburg came to poetry late and with a full heart. After twenty years as a cornhusker, hobo, coal heaver in Omaha, union organizer in Milwaukee, soldier in Puerto Rico, and newsman in Chicago, he started to write, speak, and sing about the American people. His first book came out when he was thirty-eight. And even then he wasn't sure that his loose-limbed, socialist, free verse was even poetry.
His second book (1918) won him a Pulitzer Prize. His biography of Lincoln earned him a second Pulitzer and enough money to buy his own farm. His Complete Poems (1951) won him a third. As "The American Vagabond", he went on the speaker circuit with his old guitar and a voice like the prairie wind, talking about Walt Whitman and Abe Lincoln, reciting his poems, and playing folk songs he had collected over the years. He was a great showman, and the older he got the more people loved him.
In his long, last poem, The People, Yes, and in his introduction to The Family of Man, an exhibit of photographs that toured the world, he wrote about the "toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers; landlords and the landless; the loved and the unloved; the brutal and the compassionate-one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being."
Charles L. Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer and tutor at Oxford, a tall man, fussy, brilliant, and deaf in one ear, with a tendency to stammer among adults but not among children. He wore gray gloves most of the time, walked ten miles in a day, and kept an index card on every dinner guest noting what had been served so as not to repeat the experience.
He had always written poetry. In 1856 he made friends with the family of his new dean, Henry Liddle, and on a picnic with ten-year-old Alice and her sisters in 1862, he made up a story that would become Alice in Wonderland. When it was published in 1865, Dodgson, as "Lewis Carroll", became world-famous, and though he would write several other books, nothing he did came close to his first success.
Edgar Lee Masters was born and raised in the Midwest and worked as a lawyer for most of his life until, after several unsuccessful poems and essays, he published The Spoon River Anthology at the age of forty-seven. It was a collection of 215 poems, each the epitaph of one of the dead in his mythical small Spoon River cemetery. Told in their own laconic voice, they exposed the moral decay, hypocrisy, and despair Masters had found at the heart of Middle American life.
The book was an overnight sensation, the most popular volume of poetry ever published in America. But as a result of the scandal that exploded around him, Masters had to leave town. After traveling briefly in Europe, he settled in New York, living in the Chelsea Hotel and trying to duplicate his astonishing feat. Thirty-nine books followed-biographies, poetry, novels-all without success. He died in a nursing home thirty-five years later with no assets left except the copyright to his famous book.
Edward FitzGerald came from one of the wealthiest families in England, and with nothing else to do, he grew interested in Persian literature. When a friend sent him an eleventh-century poem, he found his life's work. The author, Omar Khayyam, was an Iranian mathematician and philosopher of extraordinary wisdom, and over the next thirty years FitzGerald paraphrased his quatrains (rubaiyaas) and put them into a new sequence, following from morning to night.
A shy and unambitious man who rarely left the grounds of his estate, he gave new and eloquent voice to the ancient poet's advice: live and be merry for life is short. FitzGerald did the opposite, and died quietly in his sleep at the age of seventy-four.
Elizabeth Barrett was a promising poet by the time she met Robert Browning, though suffering from a lung ailment for which she was taking morphine. Her Cry of the Children in 1842 condemned the poverty and squalor of England at the onset of the industrial age, and her new book of poems in 1844 established her as one of the country's most popular social critics.
After a secret courtship vehemently opposed by her father, she married the poet Robert Browning and during their fifteen-year marriage she wrote the love poems on which her lasting reputation is based. "She was a slight delicate figure," one of her friends wrote, "with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of her expressive face . . . and a smile like a sunbeam".
Emily Dickinson was deeply affected by the death of a childhood friend, and as a young woman, she slowly withdrew from social contact with others. By 1858 she had confined herself to her home in Amherst, Massachusetts and over the next ten years she wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, showing only a few of them to her close friends.
In 1862, when she had written several hundred poems, she sent a selection to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, author of an Atlantic Monthly article about new poetry. He gave her kind encouragement but told her later that her verse was "too delicate" to publish. Undaunted, she resigned herself from that point on to write in private against the time when she would become immortal.
She was described as "a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair", lively and indulgent with children, a warm and loyal correspondent, and a gifted gardener. But then her dog died. Other deaths piled up and by 1885 thoughts of death obsessed her. Now a complete recluse who rarely left her room, she said she felt a "great darkness coming". After her death her family quarreled over the publication of her poems and it was another fifty years before the full extent of her work saw the light.
Emma Lazarus was born to an old patrician family in New York but devoted to helping other Jews escape the pogroms and persecutions of Eastern Europe. Her bold poetry and essays caught the attention of the committee that was erecting Bartholdi's new Statue of Liberty, and in 1883 they hired her to write a poem they could use in their fundraising. Lazarus died of Hodgkin's Lymphoma soon after, but years later, philanthropist Georgina Schuyler, who had known Lazarus, found the poem again and campaigned to have the last five lines included as a plaque inside the statue, a tribute to her old friend.
Over the years those lines became the defining message of the statue itself, and in 1945 the whole sonnet was placed over the statue's main entrance. Bartholdi's original vision had been that the statue would encourage the downtrodden in other countries to rise up and claim their freedom, as America had done. But Lazarus' poem invited them to America instead, completely changing the statue's message and significance.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an innovative poet who trained as a Jesuit priest, but at the end of his life he felt he had failed in both worlds. He grew up delighting in verse and in the joyful, sensuous life it seemed to evoke. But when the time came to join the church he threw his poems into a bonfire, believing they violated his vow of humility. Seven years later, studying for ordination in Wales, he was encouraged by his supervisor to write again, and he began producing the best poems of his life.
But in the industrial towns of England, the work of a young priest and the sadness of the smoky mill life depressed him. His final assignment, teaching Greek at the University College Dublin, left him even gloomier. He didn't like the city. He wrote little, contracted typhoid fever from the polluted water, and died at forty-five.
Helene Johnson grew up in Boston, and when she was selected for a prize by Opportunity Magazine (the judges were James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost) she talked her mother into letting her go to the awards dinner in New York. She was eighteen. She and her cousin, the novelist Dorothy West, went together, shared a room at the Harlem Y, and stayed on, making friends with Zora Hurston and writing all the time.
She was the youngest of the Harlem Renaissance poets, appearing regularly in newspapers and magazines, including Vanity Fair, but in her brief career she was recognized as one of the most exciting poets of the new movement. She published only twenty-eight poems, and stopped sending them out in 1935, disappearing into her marriage. But she said later, rocking at her window, that she wrote a poem every day for the rest of her life. She died at eight-nine.
John Gillespie Magee was the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, educated in England and winner of the poetry prize at Rugby School in 1936. He was accepted at Yale but chose instead to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, getting his wings in June 1941. At nineteen, he was full of enthusiasm, and after the seventh flight in his Spitfire he wrote a poem, showed it to his commander at lunch, and sent it home the same day on the back of a letter to his parents.
A few months later Magee was killed in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire. His father, curate of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, published the poem in a church letter, and Archibald MacLeish included it in a Library of Congress exhibit called "Faith and Freedom".
John Masefield was sent to sea at the age of thirteen to break his addiction to books, which his aunt thought injurious to his health. But his experience had the opposite effect. Even after he jumped ship in New York City, he was buying up to 20 books a week. He married at twenty-three and published his first poems at twenty-four, including "Sea Fever", for which he became forever known.
He might not be a great poet: Yeats, his close friend and mentor, advised him to sing in music halls. By 1913 his best poetry was certainly done. But his rhythm and realism would open the way for Robert Frost and others to follow, and his songs of the sea are indelible. He was named Poet Laureate in 1930, and was an active advocate of poetry in public life for thirty-seven years, publishing his last book at eighty-eight.
Born in Dublin, Jonathan Swift went to work for a London politician, producing the sharply comic pamphlets that won a small but influential following. By 1710, as the chief political writer for those who wanted greater freedom for Irish Catholics, he was made Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin. He said he hated the Irish (as James Joyce did) but in the years that followed he created the satires and political tracts that made him one of the country's great patriots.
Langston Hughes was struggling as a young poet in Washington, working as a hotel busboy when he saw Vachel Lindsay come into the dining room. Hughes slipped a copy of his poems under Lindsay's plate and that night the famous poet announced that he had discovered a new talent. Hughes' career was launched.
Over the next forty years, he wrote poems, novels, short stories, and essays, a sustained and prodigious output that established him as the leading African American writer in the country. His poetry had the jump and jostle of a Harlem jazz joint while his essays coolly wrote the new rules, not only for the Harlem Renaissance but for the new Black literature. As a young man writing about Harlem lowlife, he was too radical. As an old man in the age of Black Power, he was too tame. Whatever he did, the critics ignored him until, to everyone's surprise, he had become as much a part of American literature as Whitman.
Paul Laurence Dunbar grew up in Dayton, Ohio, son of an escaped slave and a civil war hero who died young. He was the only African American in his high school. With the support of his washerwoman mother, as well as his friends Wilbur and Orville Wright, Dunbar excelled in school and published his first poetry book at twenty-one, working as an elevator operator to pay the printer. His classical poems were his favorites, but his dialect poems offering a sentimental portrait of slavery were what the market wanted, and they made him famous on the recital circuit in the United States and England.
He married a well-educated bi-racial woman light enough to pass as white, but began to drink heavily and beat her until she left him. In 1898 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and over the next five years he wrote novels, short stories, and poetry, traveling the circuit, performing his dialect poems, and drinking alone. He died at his mother's home in Dayton at thirty-three.
It takes a certain sturdiness of soul to be a farmer in New England, but in a lifetime of great difficulty, great achievement, and great honor, Robert Frost returned again and again to his rural world. He inherited a New Hampshire farm from his grandfather in 1900 and wrote his first poetry there. In 1912 he took his wife and four children to England and wrote an even better book. In 1915, now published in America, Frost came home to a new farm in New Hampshire and then another one in Vermont. And by 1923, with his fourth book and first of four Pulitzer Prizes, he had found his voice: stoic in the face of death, with a pagan pragmatism and a farmer's faith in spring.
He cultivated the public persona of country crank, and often said he had "a lover's quarrel with the world". But it was more love than quarrel, and in time the world loved him back. A long second career as a university lecturer brought him a little financial security, and by 1940, at the age of sixty-six, he was living in a cabin on his farm again while his secretary and guests lived over in the main house. His writing had all but stopped. His wife and four of his six children were dead. He was welcome in the grand houses of Cambridge and Amherst, but he preferred the misty demons of Vermont. "Who better could appraise, the kindred spirit of an inner haze".
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer who rejected Christianity and convention as a young man, only to embrace it later as a Tory and supporter of the empire. He traveled the world, producing the books that would make him famous, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and A Child's Garden of Verses. But he was plagued with poor health throughout his life and fought depression in his last years, telling friends that he hoped his illnesses would kill him. "Requiem" is the verse on his gravestone in Samoa, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-four.
Sara Teasdale was never a well child. She grew up in a wealthy St. Louis family with a nurse in constant attendance. She recovered enough to begin publishing her poetry in 1907, and in 1914 she married a prosperous businessman who could continue the care to which she was accustomed. They moved to New York and four years later she won what is now the Pulitzer Prize.
Yet the solitary sadness so evident in her poetry must have been there in her life as well. She divorced her husband in 1929 and went to England to begin a biography of Christina Rossetti. But she fell ill again, came home, and never fully recovered. A nervous condition blocked her writing and left her lying awake night after night until she finally got into a warm bath, took an overdose of barbiturates, and went to sleep.
Sir Philip Sidney was one of many soldiers, lawyers, and bureaucrats around the Queen who wrote poetry about her, all seeking political influence and a royal pension. His writing was better and more ambitious than his peers. He produced the first serious cycle of 118 sonnets and two great poems, though they were not widely known until after his death. As a militant Protestant and an advocate of war against Spain, he joined in the battle of the Netherlands against the invading Spanish. The Netherlands lost and Sidney was mortally wounded, dying of gangrene a month later. It was famously said that he spent his last days writing a song to be sung at his deathbed, and that as he died, he shared his water with another wounded soldier, saying "thy necessity is yet greater than mine".
Job Titles:
- Medical School to Be an Artist
Vachel Lindsay left medical school to be an artist, and then left art to become the "Prairie Troubadour", walking across America, selling his poems for a penny and presenting them when he could at Grange halls and churches. Sometimes he would write an original poem on the spot in return for a meal or clean clothes. By 1913 his performances were famous: wild declamations more jazz than poetry, shouting and whispering, stamping and waving his arms, bringing what he called the "gospel of beauty", the "higher vaudeville", to the masses. "Let us be prophets of Beauty, in this nation, half begun, and still to grow."
Walter de la Mare worked in the statistics office of Anglo-American Oil until his short stories and poetry won him a pension from the British government. He was particularly interested in the imagination of children and loved writing for them. His Songs of Childhood, published in 1902, established de la Mare as a popular writer, and he continued to produce fiction, poetry, and anthologies for thirty years.