LibGuides: Poetry: American Poets

Notable Poems

Anyone lived in a pretty how town, by E. E. Cummings
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Most readers of E.E. Cummings’ work would agree that Cummings’ use of language is at the very least problematic. His attempt to democratize language by abandoning strict adherence to the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalization is just one of his many idiosyncrasies.
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, by William Carlos Williams
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
William Carlos Williams' long, late poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” is remarkable in several regards. It is the fullest example of his work in the variable foot and in the triadic (or three-foot, stepped-down) line, a breakthrough form he discovered and utilized for many of his poems from the 1950s.
Daddy, by Sylvia Plath
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
The last six months of Sylvia Plath's life produced much of the work for which she is now known. Plath wrote “Daddy” in October 1962, about five months before her suicide in February 1963.
Diving Into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Diving into the Wreck (1973), Adrienne Rich's seventh collection, explores her growing opposition to the patriarchal order influencing her identity as a woman and a poet.
For the Union Dead, by Robert Lowell
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
While Life Studies (1959) is widely regarded as Robert Lowell's true arrival, “For the Union Dead” is perhaps the most well-known and widely anthologized of his poems.
Howl, by Alan Ginsberg
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), “Howl” (including “Footnote to Howl”) marks the high point of Beat Generation literary achievement and is arguably the best-known American poem published.
One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop
from Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Elizabeth Bishop's much-anthologized poem “One Art” is a villanelle.
Shine, Perishing Republic, by Robinson Jeffers
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Critics (but not readers) avoided Robinson Jeffers’ poetry in the mid-20th century, especially formalists such as the New Critics, because of its content as well as its form. Jeffers is primarily a nature poet.
The Bridge, by Hart Crane
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Hart Crane's second book, a 1,200-line poem begun in 1923, published in 1929 in Paris and in America in 1930, The Bridge is the. major production of his career as well as one of the most misunderstood poems of the 20th century. It presents Crane's “myth of America,” his answer to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922).
The Kingfishers, by Charles Olson
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
“The Kingfishers” is generally regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century for its influence on nearly every experimental tradition in postwar American poetry.
The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
In 1912 Robert Frost gave up his secure teaching post at the State Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and traveled with his wife and children to England. “The Road Not Taken” has often been interpreted as expressing his risky decision to leave America for an uncertain future in a country where he could write poetry in peaceful poverty.
The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
The most representative, if not the greatest, poem of the 20th century is, outside Ezra Pound's Cantos, perhaps also the most difficult.

American Poets

Maya Angelou (1928 - ): Topic Page
Poems, autobiographies, plays; news editor. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou is a prolific autobiographer, poet, and writer.

Ashbery - Collected Poems 1956-1987 by John Ashbery; Mark Ford With this volume, published in 2008, John Ashbery became the first living poet to have his work collected in the Library of America series. Beginning with Some Trees in 1956, John Ashbery charted a profoundly original and individual course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, and alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language. This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the complete texts of his first twelve books, including such groundbreaking collections as Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975), and Houseboat Days . It also features an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades, a rare treasure trove for poetry lovers. This volume is a landmark portrait of a modern master.
Call Number: PS3501.S475 A6 2008
ISBN: 9781598530285
Publication Date: 2008
Ashbery - Collected Poems, 1990-2000 by John Ashbery; Mark Ford (Editor) A collection of poetry by John Ashbery. Published for his ninetieth birthday, Library of America presents the second volume of John Ashbery's collected poems, spanning a crucial and prolific decade in the poet's work. The volume opens with the indispensable Flow Chart (1991), in a complete text for the first time. The other collections gathered here--Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), and Your Name Here (2000)--show Ashbery perfecting the playful, cerebral style that has made his poetry a genre unto itself, highly influential and often imitated. Long an art critic and one of the shrewdest observers of the American art scene, Ashbery engages with the renowned outsider artist Henry Darger in the fascinating book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999), inspired by the exuberant, unsettling fictional universe Darger created. The volume concludes with a selection of twenty-six previously uncollected poems.
Call Number: PS3501.S475 A6 2017
ISBN: 9781598535358
Publication Date: 2017

W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973): Topic Page
English-born US poet. He wrote some of his most original poetry, such as Look, Stranger! (1936), in the 1930s when he led the influential left-wing literary group that included the writers Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis.
Lucille Clifton (1936 - )
From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Lucille Clifton, former poet laureate of Maryland, writes strikingly simple, unrhymed, epigrammatic poetry about her life, her family, and the lives of African-Americans.
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886): Topic Page
1830–86, American poet, b. Amherst, Mass. She is widely considered one of the greatest poets in American literature.
T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965): Topic Page
American-born British critic and writer whose poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) established him as a major literary figure.
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963): Topic Page
1874–1963, American poet, b. San Francisco. Perhaps the most popular and beloved of 20th-century American poets.

Be With by Forrest Gander Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section--a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's--rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has beencalled one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane." (less)
Call Number: PS3557.A47 A6 2018
ISBN: 9780811226059
Publication Date: 2018

Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967): Topic Page
Poet, writer, playwright, and librettist, born in Joplin, Missouri, USA.

Robert Lowell by Kay Redfield Jamison "The best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind now gives us a groundbreaking life of one of the major American poets of the twentieth century that is at the same time a fascinating study of the relationship between manic-depressive (bipolar) illness, creative genius, and character. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell (1917-1977) put his manic-depressive illness into the public domain. Now Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise to bear on his story, illuminating the relationship between bipolar illness and creativity, and examining how Lowell's illness and the treatment he received came to bear on his work. His New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets, vivid presence as a teacher and writer refusing to give up in the face of mental illness--Jamison gives us Lowell's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of the poet's intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and was the first biographer to speak to his daughter. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was--both despite and because of mental illness--a passionate, original observer of the human condition"
Call Number: RC516 .J363 2017
ISBN: 9780307700278
Publication Date: 2017

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963): Topic Page
One of the outstanding poets of her generation, Sylvia Plath became a heroine to many feminist readers with her intense and harrowing work. She was married to Ted Hughes, the future poet laureate, who edited her Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems after her suicide.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849): Topic Page
Poet and writer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972): Topic Page
1885–1972, American poet, critic, and translator, b. Hailey, Idaho, grad. Hamilton College, 1905, M.A. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1906.
Adrienne Rich (1929 - ): Topic Page
American poet and essayist whose works, notably Diving Into the Wreck (1973), concern radical feminism, lesbianism, and political activism.
Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963)
From The Columbia Encyclopedia
American poet, b. Saginaw, Mich., educated at the Univ. of Michigan and Harvard. A poet of the Midwest, Roethke combined a love of the land with his vision of the development of the individual.
Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974): Topic Page
American poet whose works, including the collections Live or Die (1966) and The Death Notebooks (1974), document her struggle with mental illness and her search for faith.
Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955): Topic Page
American poet whose artful and innovative works, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning” (both 1923), concern the role of imagination in bringing order to a chaotic world.
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892): Topic Page
American poet, b. West Hills, N.Y. Considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets, Walt Whitman celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man.