Poet of the Week

You've seen The Poem of the Week, so now here's Poet of the Week! Share your favourite poet, whether they're an old classic or someone rather new. Share a YWSer whose poetry you admire!

I'll include a Featured Poet each week, but please add your own too.
Give us an interesting fact on them, your favourite line of theirs. What makes them one of your favourites?

In spirit of the 14 Lines for 14 Years: A Sonnet Contest, why not start with a classic? Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets in total. Perhaps Sonnet 18 being his most prominent?

Don Marquis is one of my all time favorite poets. He created the characters Archy the cockroach and Mehitable the cat, and it's from these two perspectives that many of his poems are written. His poetry is deceptively simple with a modern feel and an often present philosophical edge. Marquis writing often also uses a dark or ironic humor, which can be found in two of my favorite poems by him "a spider and a fly" and also "the lesson of the moth".

I just heard that Mary Oliver passed away, so here's a post for her.

Mary Oliver was an American Pulitzer-Prize winning poet. Her poetry is wonderfully observant and reflective, and often spiritual and empowering. You can read more about her life and poetry books at poets.org, because she wrote quite a bit!

Some of my favorite poems of hers, are "Praying" and "Morning Poem" .

Here's a beautiful line from her poem, "When Death Comes"

"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

Langston Hughes fought for racial equality and social justice, which can be seen through most of his writing. I was first introduced to the poetry of Hughes when I read his poem I, Too in class (which has been one of my all-time favorites ever since), and so I began to read some of his other poetry. One of my other favorites of his, that I discovered in a collection of poems of mine, is Dream Variations. I admire his use of poetry as a voice and the subtle messages in each poem.

Lines from his first published poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

Edgar Allan Poe is a well known American poet and short story writer. His writing might be described as often suspenseful, mournful, creepy, and at times grotesque. He had many opinions regarding literary theory, especially regarding poetry, and believed poetry does not need to produce a moral or truth, but ought to be written for effect and to communicate a sense of beauty and emotion that is universally accessible. Some of his most well known works are "The Raven" (poem) and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (short story).

While his "spooky-poetry" is some of his more well-known, I really appreciate his grieving and longing poetry too - his language always flows really well and his word choice is able to paint a moving picture along with whatever emotion he's communicating.

Here's some favorite lines from "A Dream Within a Dream"

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!

* Read more about Poe's life and works
* Read more about Poe's Literary Theories

Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet and teacher. She was particularly interested in rhythm and meter and influenced by Japanese poetic styles like the tanka and haiku. Most of her poetry was not published until after her death, in her book Verse. She was sick often in life, and died at the age of 36 from Tuberculosis.

Her poetry was mostly short structured styles, including her own very structured form of a cinquain. Her form of the cinquain would eventually become known as the American Cinquain and is still how cinquains are often structured today, because of her influence.

Adelaide Crapsey's poetry is short, but reflective, with a artful freedom expressed within the highly structured verse.

Here is one of her cinquains below:

November Night

Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

poetry source: Poetry Foundation
* More Info about the poet
* More Info about the poet
* And from our own YWS Knowledge Base:Beautiful Cinquains & How To Write Them

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a Romantic English poet well-known for his political ideas and atheism. His long poem, The Masque of Anarchy (or Mask of Anarchy) has been credited with sowing the idea for non-violent resistance. He also wrote extensively about nature and mortality. His poetry tends to have a sardonic or ironic tone, or, as said by John Bleasdale, his "appropriation" of revelatory forms like sonnets, revealed an "ironic sense of self-awareness".

One of his signature poetic techniques was that of symbolism, as he often used images of nature to symbolise political ideas or events during his lifetime. For example, in his poem 'Liberty', he has been said to describe the political turmoil in Europe shortly after the Napoleonic Wars.

The fiery mountains answer each other;
Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zonel
The tempestuous oceans awake one another,
And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,
When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

He was also famous for what a modern literary critic, Firat Karadac, calls blending "the sacred and the profane". For instance, in The Witch of Atlas http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/witch.html, where he depicts a witch with praise usually reserved for the divine:

Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device,
The works of some Saturnian Archimage,
Which taught the expiations at whose price
Men from the Gods might win that happy age
Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice;
And which might quench the Earth-consuming rage
Of gold and blood -- till men should live and move
Harmonious as the sacred stars above;

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy-bysshe-shelley

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a highly successful and respected American poet. She was a master of the sonnet form, and her style combined modern attitudes and beliefs with traditional forms and structures. Incredibly, she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923!

Her talent in poetry was not the only thing that contributed to her popularity - she was known for her engaging readings and performances, as well as a progressive political viewpoint and honest portrayals of both heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Originally she wasn't planning on writing poetry, she was actually interested in becoming a concert pianist! However when her teacher told her that her hands were "too small", she turned to writing.

One of her best-known poems is "First Fig" from A Few Figs from Thistles:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

(A Few Figs from Thistles was a collection of poems that criticized philosophic idealism in a flippant and cynical manner.)

My personal favourite is Sonnet II, "Time Does Not Bring Relief".



Poetry Foundation, Edna St. Vincent Millay
Poetry Foundation, "First Fig"

Robert Frost

Robert Frost was an American Poet who earned four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. His poems often covered very ordinary subjects in philosophical ways. His poems will use causal colloquial language right along with more traditional meters and rhyme schemes. "At the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Frost was given the unprecedented honor of being asked to read a poem." (Poetry Foundation) - Frost's poetry and themes remain influential in poetry, literature, and language. For instance "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a poem utilized throughout the classic "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton and President Joe Biden uses "Promises to Keep" borrowed from Frost as the title of his auto-biography. He uses compelling natural imagery that paints a picture along with language that is easy to grasp though often holds a richer, deeper meaning upon further consideration.

Some of Frost's most popular poems are...
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Road not Taken
Mending Wall
Acquainted with the Night

and two places to find YWS discussions of Robert Frost's Poems are...
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening
Departmental

you, are a great poet! unless-- of course, you are a proser. In that case, Proser of the day!

happy social month!

brought to you by #UnSoMo

I must say that TS Eliot is one of my favorite. His poetry make me happy.

very interesting. thanks.

Jean Valentine

Valentine’s poetry often requires (and rewards) careful reading. She wrote with the belief that poetry could give voice to the unseen and unspoken parts of life. Her poetry is often regarded for its economy of language, but despite the brevity, her poems are rich in emotional depth and introspection. She served as the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010.

My introduction to her work was through her poem Fellini in Purgatory. This can be read in her poetry book Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2004.

Shoveler, are you eating the earth?
Earth eating you?

And he, as calm as calm, though he was dead:
"Oh,—milt,—and we're all of us milt."

Other notable poems of hers include:
Orpheus and Eurydice
Actuarial File
The River at Wolf
Sanctuary

Richard Siken

Richard Siken is a contemporary poet best known for his poetry that explores themes of love, violence, longing, and obsession. His debut collection, Crush (2005), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. It has since become a landmark work in 21st-century poetry and in online communities.

One of Siken's signature poetic techniques is his use of repetition and enjambment to create a sense of immediacy. His poems unfold in a stream-of-consciousness style. An example would be "Scheherazade," the opening poem of Crush:

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forgot that they are horses.

Siken's work is also noted for its interplay between tenderness and violence. He employs irony and self-awareness a lot, particularly when he dramatizes the act of storytelling itself. His narrative voice is unreliable, desperate to be understood, and yet suspicious of language's ability to hold truth.

Some of my favourite poems of his include Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out and Real Estate.