T.S. Eliot

T.S. ELIOTThomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th

century. Although he was born an

American he moved to the United

Kingdom and was naturalised as a

British subject at age 39.

The poem that made his name,

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is regarded as a

masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what

have become some of the best-known poems in the

English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste

Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and

Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly

Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in

1948.

This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Men

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

The Waste Land

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

Murder In the Cathedral

I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse — But all may be described in verse.

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

In my beginning is my end.Four Quartets

ALLEN GINSBERGGinsberg (1926 – 1997) was an American poet and one of the

leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem "Howl", in which he

celebrated his fellow "angel-headed hipsters" and harshly denounced what he saw as the

destructiveforces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and

sexual repression. His poem, "Howl" is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation.

SYLVIA PLATHSylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)

was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Following a long

struggle with depression and a marital separation, she

committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to

surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy. Plath is

credited

with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982,

she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also

wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

WALLACE

STEVENS

Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was a major American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading,

Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life

working as a lawyer.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", all of which appear in his Collected Poems for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for

Poetry in 1955. Harmonium was his first collection of poetry.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMSWilliam Carlos Williams

(1883 – 1963) was an American poet closely

associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a

pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine.

Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he

did at being a physician"; but during his long lifetime, Williams excelled at both.

The Red Wheelbarrow is a poem often considered the masterwork of

William Carlos Williams. The 1923 poem exemplifies the Imagist-influenced

philosophy of “no ideas but in things.” The Red Wheelbarrow was originally

published in Williams' 1923 anthology titled Spring and All.so much

dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving for breakfast

Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

This Is Just To Say

William Carlos Williams

e.e. cummingsE. E. Cummings (1894 – 1962) was a poet,

essayist, playwright, novelist who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his unconventional

use of grammar, punctuation, and language. Cummings's name is often styled

“e.e. cummings” in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used

capital letters only irregularly in his verse and did not object when publishers began

lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized his name in his signature and in the title pages of

original editions of his books. His first book of verse was Tulips and Chimneys (1923). He is remembered as a

preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.

in Just-

in Justspring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame baloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old baloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed baloonMan whistles far and wee

I thank You God

i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing--human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e.cummings

CARL SANDBURGCarl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He

won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a

biography of Abraham Lincoln. Chicago Poems

Rootabaga Stories (for children)

The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Corn Huskers

Abraham Lincoln: The War Years

Hog Butcher for the World,Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;Stormy, husky, brawling,City of the Big Shoulders:They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,Bareheaded,Shoveling,Wrecking,Planning,Building, breaking, rebuilding,Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people, Laughing!Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

“CHICAGO”

“FOG”The fog comeson little cat feet.

It sits lookingover harbor and cityon silent haunchesand then moves on.

ROBERT FROSTRobert Lee Frost (1874 – 1963) was an American poet highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American

colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from

rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them

to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and

often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer

Prizes for Poetry. Frost was 86 when he spoke and performed a reading of his poetry

at the inauguration of President Kennedy on January 20, 1961.

FROST POEMS“Stopping By Woods On

A Snowy Evening”

“After Apple Picking”

“Home Burial”

“Nothing Gold Can Stay”

“The Death of the Hired Man”

“The Gift Outright”

“The Oven Bird”

“Mending Wall”“Fire and Ice”

“Birches”“The Road Not

Taken”

A poem begins in delight and ends in

wisdom.

“Mending Wall ““Good fences make good neighbours.”

ROBINSON JEFFERSRobinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962) was

known for his work about the central California coast. Most of Jeffers'

poetry was written in classic narrative and epic form, but today he is also

known for his short verse, and considered an icon of the environ-

mental movement. Poems, including Tamar and Roan Stallion, introduced Jeffers as a master of the epic form, reminiscent of ancient Greek poets.

These poems were full ofcontroversial subject matter like incest, murder and parricide.

Jeffers' short verse includes "Hurt Hawks“, "The Purse-Seine”, and "Shine, Perishing Republic“.

In the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of his popularity, Jeffers was famous

for being a tough outdoorsman, living in relative solitude and writing

of the difficulty and beauty of the wild. He spent most of his life in Carmel, California, in a granite

house that he had built himself called "Tor House and Hawk Tower". Tor is a Celtic term describing a large outcropping of rock. Many of his

poems reflect the influence of stone and building on his life. His

intense relationship with the physical world is described in often brutal and apocalyptic verse, and demonstrates a preference for the natural world over what he sees as the negative influence of

civilization.

The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads— Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Carmel Point

ROBERT LOWELLRobert Lowell (1917 - 1977) was an

American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He

was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947

until 1948. He won the Pulitzer Prize in both 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award in 1960, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. Lowell

was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a family that included poets Amy Lowell and

James Russell Lowell. Lord Weary’s Castle“The Quaker Graveyard

in Nantucket”Life Studies

For the Union Dead

EZRA POUNDEzra Pound (1885 – 1972) was an

American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early

modernist movement in poetry. He became known for his role in

developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and Georgian poets, favored tight language, unadorned

imagery, and a strong correspondence between the verbal and musical

qualities of the verse and the moodit expressed. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912),

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos, which consumed his middle and late career, and

was published between 1917 and 1969.

His own work apart, Ezra Pound was responsible for advancing the careers of some of the best-known modernist writers of the

early 20th century. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, and Hemingway, he befriended and helped Marianne

Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E. Cummings, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles

Olson. Hugh Witemeyer argues that the Imagist movement was the most important in 20th-century English language poetry

because hardly any prominent poet of Pound's generation and the two generations after him was untouched by it. As early as

1917 Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry: "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and

mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The

point is, he will be mentioned."

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATSWilliam Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was an Anglo-Irish poet and playwright, and one of the

foremost figures of 20th century literature. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel

Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives

expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of

the few

writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works

include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats’ 1920 poem, "The Second Coming" contains some of literature's most potent images of the twentieth century.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned.The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

The poem served as the inspiration for the name of the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

John Singer Sargent,

Portrait of W. B. Yeats,

1908“Easter, 1916”

“Sailing to Byzantium”

DYLAN THOMASDylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer

who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry,

he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in

America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice

with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as

famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the

celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the

craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art" and the rhapsodic

lyricism of "Fern Hill'".

Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Click here to hear Dylan Thomas read this poem.

Another popular book by Thomas

- A Child’s Christmas in Wales