Edgar Allan Poe
Sonnet: To Science
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
Bio: Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, and lived only age 40. He was an American poet, a master of the horror tale, and credited with practically inventing the detective story.
Wallace Stevens
Gray Room
Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl--
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.
Bio:Wallace Stevens was born was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1955. He attended Harvard Iniversity where he was a part of the Harvard Advocate. He was not recognized for his poems until one was fetured in a 1914 wartime issue of Poetry, which he won a prize for. He went on to create a one act play, eight volumes of poetry and essays.
Picture Source: Gallery of Writers
Gwendolyn Brooks
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.
Bio: Gwendolyn Brooks was born June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. She moved to Chicgo soon after birth. Gwendolyn went to Hyde Park High School which was the leading white school, but then transferred top the all black Wendell Phillips High School. In 1963 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville started her career.
Picture Source: Modern American Poetry
Robert Frost
Into My Own
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto th eedge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him the knew--
Only more sure of all I though was true.
Bio: Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco. In 1885 his father died leaving his family with only 8 dollars after bills were paid, therefore he had to move with his grandparents in Lawrence, Massachusets. 1890 was when his first published poem came out, "La Noche Triste." In 1891 Frost passed all the entrance tests for Harvard College and was chosen to be cheif editor of the bulletin for the 1891-92 school year. Then in 1893 he became a teacher for 8th graders for several weeks. 1903 he published a short story, "Trap Nests."
John Donne
Self-Love
He that cannot choose but love,
And strives against it still,
Never shall my fancy move,
For he loves against his will ;
Nor he which is all his own,
And cannot pleasure choose ;
When I am caught he can be gone,
And when he list refuse ;
Nor he that loves none but fair,
For such by all are sought ;
Nor he that can for foul ones care,
For his judgement then is nought ;
Nor he that hath wit, for he
Will make me his jest or slave ;
Nor a fool when others —
He can neither —
Nor he that still his mistress prays,
For she is thrall'd therefore ;
Nor he that pays, not, for he says
Within, she's worth no more.
Is there then no kind of men
Whom I may freely prove?
I will vent that humour then
In mine own self-love.
Bio : John Donne was born in London, around early 1572. His work is interesting because almost none of it was released in his lifetime. Two years after Donne's death when his poems were released in a collected edition his son denied that his father had ever written them because of the knottiness of his deep love poems.
William Shakespeare
Sonnet #14
- Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,
- And yet methinks I have astronomy;
- But not to tell of good or evil luck,
- Of plagues, of dearths, or season's quality;
- Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
- Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
- Or say with princes if it shall go well
- By oft predict that I in heaven find;
- But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
- And, constant stars, in them I read such art
- As truth and beauty shall together thrive
- If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert:
- Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
- Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
- And yet methinks I have astronomy;
Bio: William Shakespeare was born in1564 but the exact date of his birth is not known. All that is known of Shakespeare's youth is that he presumably attended the Stratford Grammar School, and did not proceed to Oxford or Cambridge. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and they hjad three children. Seven years later Shakespeare was recognized as an actor, poet, and playwright, when a rival playwright, Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow" in "A Groatsworth of Wit."
Picture Source: William Shakspeare
Pablo Neruda
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Bio: Pablo Neruda was born onJuly 12th, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. When he was only thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily "La Mañana." Among them was, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia, which was his first publication and his first poem. Between 1927 and 1935, the government put him in charge of a number of honorary consulships, which took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. In this time he wrote the collection of poems called, Residencia en la tierra (1933), which marked his literary breakthrough.
Picture Source: Pablo Neruda
Percy Shelley
Time
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea?
Bio: He was born in 1792, and was know for being a romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and conservative values. For example, in 1811 Shelley was expelled from the college for publishing The Necessity Of Atheism, which he wrote with Thomas Jefferson Hogg. He was disowned by his family after he eloped with the 16-year old Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London tavern owner. However, the poet's marriage to Harriet was a failure. In 1813 Shelley published his first important poem, the atheistic Queen Mab.
Picture Source: Percy Shelley
Dylan Thomas
Poem in October
“My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days”
Bio: Dylan was born on October 27, 1914 and unfortunately died on November 9, 1953. During his life he wrote several great poems. He was most famous for his writing the play Under Milk Wood.
Picture Source: Dylan Thomas
William B. Yeats
Easter 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
from counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club;
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Bio: William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, and was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He grew up in County Sligo, and in London. He went back to Dublin when he was fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but it didn't take long for his to realize that he preferred writing poetry.
Picture Source: William B. Yeats