Varpness AP Lit. Poet Backgrounds for Test

Maya Angelou

• Renowned author and civil rights activist

• First Black female director

• Raped by mother's BF (Mr. Freeman) --> Mute for 5 years

• Freeman was jailed for 1 day, then killed by her uncles

• Her autobiography (Caged Bird Sings) details her traumatic childhood, racism, and self-discovery

Ezra Pound

• Controversial poet, supporter of Mussolini/Fascism

• Made radio broadcasts for Italian gov't during WWII --> labeled a traitor by US

• Surrendered to US forces, held in military detention camp

• Deemed unfit for trial (mental illness), incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital for 12+ years

• Married to Dorothy Shakespear but had 50-year affair with Olga Rudge

• Wife, mistress, and daughter (Mary) lived together at times

Emily Dickinson

• Reclusive poet, nearly 1,800 poems discovered after death by sister

• Possible agoraphobia, but debated

• Poetry themes: death, isolation, immortality, nature

• Death certificate: Bright's disease (kidney ailment), but likely heart failure from hypertension

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• Celebrated poet, chronic pain, dependent on laudanum/morphine from a young age

• Secretly married poet Robert Browning, against controlling father's wishes

• Father (Edward Moulton-Barrett) disowned her, never forgave her

• Last word: "Beautiful" (responding to husband's inquiry about how she felt)

Robert Frost

• Won 4 Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943)

• Recited "The Gift Outright" at JFK's inauguration (couldn't read his new poem due to sun's glare)

• Attended Dartmouth and Harvard, didn't graduate (illness, felt profs didn't get his work)

• Wife (Elinor Miriam White) died of heart failure in 1938

Sylvia Plath

• The Bell Jar: semi-autobiographical novel about her mental illness, hospitalization

• Treated for depression at McLean Hospital (1953), insulin shock therapy, ECT

• Married Ted Hughes (1956)

• Died by suicide (1963): gas oven; likely due to mental health struggles, separation from Hughes (his affair with Assia Wevill), and her literary struggles

• Wevill also died by suicide (1969) via gas oven, also killing her 4-year-old daughter

Sharon Olds

• Confessional poet: family, sexuality, body, trauma, politics

• Pulitzer Prize (2013) for Stag's Leap

• Controversy: explicit about private experiences (sexuality, abuse, bodily functions)

• Published first book (Satan Says) at 37 (1980)

• Teaches at NYU, NY State Poet Laureate (1998-2000)

E.E. Cummings

• Avant-garde poet: experimental with language, structure, syntax

• Harvard: BA (1915), MA (1916)

• WWI: ambulance driver in France

• Imprisoned 3.5 months (with friend): suspicion of espionage, anti-war views, lack of hatred for Germans, letters about low morale of French troops

William Butler Yeats

• 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature

• Proposed to Maud Gonne 4 times --> rejected

• Proposed to her daughter, Iseult Gonne --> rejected

• Speculation he was Iseult's father (no evidence)

• Married Georgie Hyde-Lees at 51 (she was 25)

Lord Byron (George Gordon)

• Born into financial difficulty, later inherited title and estates

• Extravagant spending, significant debts throughout his life

• Generous, donated to Greek revolutionary cause

• Bisexual: evidence in letters, journals, etc.

• Lover Lady Caroline Lamb called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" (after tumultuous public affair)

• Close, intimate relationship with half-sister Augusta Leigh --> speculation of incest

• Rumors of incest with half-sister contributed to his self-imposed exile from England

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: masterpiece about guilt, sin, redemption, nature

• Addicted to opium (laudanum)

• Famous phrases: "albatross around one's neck," "water, water, everywhere," "sadder and wiser man"

• Kubla Khan: about creative power of imagination, inspired by historical accounts of Kubla Khan

• Died: heart failure, complicated by opium addiction