Tag: William Butler Yeats

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This room holds life sketches of the poets I have studied for many years and whose works I find most compelling. Each life sketch also features links to commentaries on the each poet’s most important poems.

1. Rabindranath Tagore In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Nobel Laureate, won the literature prize for his prose translations of Gitanjali, Bengali for “song offerings.”  A true Renaissance man, he served as a poet, social reformer, and founder of a school.
2. Emily Dickinson  Dickinson lived a solitary life that in many ways paralleled that of a religious monastic. She passed her life in quiet contemplation, becoming addicted to creating little dramas resulting in her fascicles of 1775 poems, with subject matter ranging from flowers to the concept of immortality.
3. The “Shakespeare” Writer  Continued research seems to be confirming the claim by the Oxfordians that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—not Gulielmus Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon as insisted by the Stratfordians—wrote the canon of plays and poems left by the pseudonymous “William Shakespeare.”
4. James Weldon Johnson  A true “Renaissance man,” James Weldon Johnson wrote some the best spiritual poems and songs in the American literary canon.  He also held positions as attorney, diplomat, professor, and activist in a political party, fighting for the civil rights of black Americans.
5. John Donne  John Donne’s canon features two vastly different themes.  One might argue that they are diametrically opposed; his earlier works focus on sensual debauchery.  His later works take the theme of spirituality.
6. William Butler Yeats  William Butler Yeats possessed a lifelong dedication to the cultural and political rebirth of Ireland. He experienced life as a poet, playwright, and senator as he lived during turbulent shifts in Irish politics.  He had a lifelong unquenchable thirst for artistic and spiritual truth.
7. Phillis Wheatley  Phillis Wheatley’s talent was questioned but then authenticated during her lifetime, and she is now hailed by all but the most cynical as one of America’s finest poetic voices.
8. Robert Frost   Taking his place among luminaries such as Dickinson and Whitman, Frost has remained one of the most widely anthologized American poets of all time.  His poems are more complex than simple nature pieces; many are “tricky—very tricky,” as he once quipped about “The Road Not Taken.”
9. Gerard Manley Hopkins Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was a poet of exceptional originality, with an innovative approach to language.  He remains one of English literature’s most enigmatic figures—a poet-priest whose work combines Victorian sensibilities with modernist experimentation.
10. Langston Hughes Hoyt W. Fuller, critic, editor, and founder of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), has pointed out that Langston Hughes possessed a “deceptive and profound simplicity.”  Fuller insists that understanding these qualities in Hughes is key to understanding and appreciating his poetry.
11. Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s classic work Sonnets from the Portuguese is the poet’s most anthologized and widely published work, studied by students in secondary schools, colleges, and universities and appreciated by the general poetry lover.