Introducing Billy Collins

Billy Collins
(1941--)

At last!  A poet who is still alive!

Billy Collins grew up in NYC.  He became a professor of English as a college in the Bronx, and was named Poet Laureate of the USA in 2001, a position he held until 2003.  He was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.  He's read poetry at official functions at the White House three times, and he went to Russia in 2014 as a "cultural emissary."  He's won lots of prizes for his poetry.  He's been married twice.

His poetry reminds me a lot of Carl Sandburg's and Robert Frost's -- very conversational, focused on small parts of ordinary life, lots of snapshot-like poems.  If this intro post seems really short, maybe that's because Billy Collins has lived the kind of fairly ordinary life that his poems talk about!

Introducing Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes
(1901-1967)

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901, but he is most associated with a section of New York City known as Harlem.

Langston grew up all over the Midwest, as his father left the family soon after Langston was born, and his parents later divorced.  His mother was a schoolteacher and moved around frequently to find work, probably because there weren't a lot of African-American schools in the early 1900s, especially out in the mainly-white Midwest.  Langston was mainly raised by his maternal grandmother in Lawrence Kansas.  

Langston's grandmother taught him to be proud of his race, not ashamed of being black.  She taught him that being poor is not a sin, and that being rich is not a path to salvation.  And she taught him to love America, even though it was a difficult place for black people to live in at that time.  

Young Langston was often deeply unhappy over basically being abandoned by both his parents.  He often escaped into reading books because "Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."  After his grandmother died, he lived with some friends for two years, then moved in with his mother and her new husband in Cleveland, Ohio.  He went to high school there, where he began writing plays, poetry, short stories, and articles for the school newspaper.

After high school, Langston traveled to Mexico to see his father and ask him to support Langston's college ambitions.  His father agreed to help pay for his tuition if he would study engineering, not writing.  Langston finally agreed to that (but not to stopping writing), and he enrolled in Columbia University in New York City in 1921.

Langston left college after a little over a year because of the racial prejudice he experienced from professors, fellow students, and the college system itself, which initially refused to let him live in the dormitories because he was black.  After leaving college, he spent a little time in the mainly black neighborhood called Harlem before taking a job on a ship that enabled him to go to Africa and Europe.  He stayed in Paris for a while, lived in England for quite a while, and finally returned to the US in 1924.  All the time, he was still writing, mainly poetry.

When he came back to America, he worked odd jobs for a while before enrolling in Lincoln University, a black university in Pennsylvania.  This time, he stayed in school, earning his B.A. in 1929.  After that, he lived in Harlem, NYC, for the rest of his life, aside from traveling now and then.  

His reputation as a "jazz poet" (a poet whose writing feels very rhythmic and improvisational, like jazz music) grew throughout the 1920s.  Hughes particularly focuses his poetry (and fiction) on working-class people, striving to highlight their humanity and dignity, joy and courage.  He tried to help other black people see that their skin color was not something to be ashamed of, and that their cultural history was rich and worth celebrating.  

By the end of the 1920s, he was considered the leader of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that celebrated and promoted African-American art in all forms: music, literature, theatre, dance, film, and the visual arts.  Not everyone involved in the Harlem Renaissance actually lived in Harlem, but the movement was centered there.  Because Langston Hughes did live in Harlem, he was a natural leader and spokesperson for the movement, which lasted on through the 1930s.

In his poetry, fiction, and many essays, Hughes celebrated the experience of being a black American without promoting any kind of hate of those who are different.  Instead of being divided by differences, he wanted people of every race to embrace and enjoy them.  Just as he insisted there was nothing wrong with being black, he also insisted there was nothing wrong with being white, or any other race.  This made him some enemies among militant racists, both black and white, but he continued insisting that if America was a multicultural nation, then all the cultures that formed it should be celebrated.

Langston Hughes died in 1967.  Although his writing and views about race had come to be viewed as old-fashioned and unprogressive by many black intellectuals and artists during the 1950s, he was still beloved by the common black people who were the subjects of so many of his poems.  His steady insistence on not hating people who are different from you had won him fans of every color around the globe.  His poems remains some of the most delightful and delighted-in American poetry.

Introducing Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg
(1878-1967)

Carl Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878.  He quit school when he was thirteen to drive a milk delivery wagon to help support his family.  He also worked as a hotel porter, a brick layer, and a farm laborer.  He spent a little time at college, but didn't graduate, then got a job as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News.

Sandburg didn't write only poetry.  He also wrote history books, biographies for children and adults, novels, children's books, and film reviews!  He spent most of his life in the Upper Midwest, but eventually retired to North Carolina.

Sandburg joined the military during the Spanish-American War and was stationed in Puerto Rico, but he was never involved in a battle.  In 1908, he married Lillian Steichen, and the couple had three daughters.  Between 1916 and 1920, he published three collections of poetry while also working as a newspaperman.  The second collection, Cornhuskers, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.  He won a Pulitzer for history in 1940 for the latest volume in his children's biography of Abraham Lincoln.  In 1951, he won another Pulitzer for poetry.

In 1945, Carl and Lillian moved to a estate in the mountains of North Carolina that he named Connemara.  He lived there the rest of his life.  He supported the Civil Rights movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP for his writings promoting equality and civil rights, which he began back in 1919.  He died of natural causes in 1967.

I didn't get into Carl Sandburg's poetry until fairly recently.  Oh, I'd read some of his really famous poems, but it wasn't until I visited the museum at his former home in North Carolina in 2007 that I started to really enjoy his work.  He has a lot in common with Robert Frost, so it's not surprising that I like his poetry, I suppose.

Introducing Lucy Maud Montgomery

L. M. Montgomery
(1874-1942)

I know you both know who Lucy Maud Montgomery is, in that you have read books she wrote.  She's most famous for books like Anne of Green Gables, and she did publish twenty novels... but she also published more than 500 short stories AND more than 500 poems.  Her poetry is less-well-known, so I'm excited to explore a bit of it with you.

Maud had a very difficult life.  She was born on Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874, but her mother died when Maud was only 21 months old.  Maud's father asked his in-laws to raise his baby for him, as he felt he was too overcome with grief to properly care for her.  At first, he continued to live nearby and be part of her life but, when she was seven, he moved almost 3,000 miles away, to what were then called the North-West Territories (now Saskatchewan).

So, Maud grew up being cared for by grandparents who were reportedly austere and undemonstrative.  She had a lonely childhood with few friends, but created extensive imaginary worlds for herself, crowded with imaginary friends (including one named Katie Maurice she would later include in her first Anne book).  Her father remarried when she was in her early teens, but still did not ask his daughter to live with him for several years.  When she was sixteen, she did go live with her father and stepmother for one year, but returned to PEI because she did not get along with her stepmother at all.  However, while she was living with her father, she did have her first publishing success!  Her poem "On Cape LeForce" was published in a Charlottetown newspaper.  

Maud went to college and earned her teaching license in one year instead of the usual two.  She set out to support herself by teaching school, though she did not enjoy it.  And she rejected several proposals of marriage, eventually accepting one from a man she initially liked but later realized was shallow and selfish.  She had a brief romantic fling with another man who, sadly, died of influenza before she could break off her engagement to her fiancé and accept her lover's proposal.  She gave up all hope of marrying for romantic love and moved back in with her grandmother, as her grandfather has recently died.  She lived with her grandmother and cared for her until she died, while also doing a lot of writing and publishing, including publishing the first two Anne books.

When Maud was thirty-seven years old, she married Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister.  They moved to Ontario, where she wrote her next eleven books.  Ewen was not fond of literature or fiction, and the two did not have a particularly loving marriage.  They did have three sons together; one son was stillborn.  She suffered from what we would probably now diagnose as post-partum depression after the birth of their third son.  She already struggled at times with what we would probably call clinical depression.  Her husband Ewen also suffered from what we now call major depressive disorder, as well as bad health.

In 1918, Maud almost died from the Spanish flu epidemic.  She had often expressed doubts about God and Christianity in her private journals and letters, but surviving that flu seemed to result in revived faith that God did care personally about people, rather than being a remote being who watched impersonally over the world. 

Ewen suffered a nervous breakdown a year later and was never well again.  He believed in the false Calvinist idea of predestination, that only some people are elected to be saved eternally, and he came to believe he and his whole family were not part of those elect and were all doomed to hell.  This worsened Maud's own mental struggles.  Writing remained a refuge for her, as it was a way for her to maintain her mental and emotional equilibrium.  

In 1925, her husband Ewen resigned from his congregation, and he and Maud moved away.  In 1934, Ewen committed himself to a sanitorium to treat his extreme mental struggles.  Maud bought a house near Toronto with money she'd earned from her books and continued to write and publish.  In 1935, King George V made her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, a high honor bestowed in recognition of her literary contributions to society.

Maud was very upset by World War Two breaking out.  World War One had been emotionally and mentally devastating to her, and to think that the horrors of widespread war were happening again was more than she could bear.  In 1942, she was found dead in her bed.  While her official cause of death was coronary thrombosis (a blood clot moving into the heart and stopping it from beating), her family and close friends were pretty sure she had ended her own life by overdosing on some of her medicine.  She was only sixty-seven.

You can see a lot of pieces of her own life that she used to create characters in her books, which I find pretty fascinating.  

Introducing Robert Frost

Robert Frost
(1874-1963)

Robert Frost is one of my top favorite poets.  For a long time he was my absolute favorite, though now he has to kind of share that with a couple others (Langston Hughes and Kenneth Koch, if you are curious).  He was the only poet I studied while in high school that I actually liked while in high school, and I won't deny that part of that was because of the book The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, in which one of his poems gets quoted and is a big part of the book's theme.  But I also liked how accessible his poems were, and how many of them were about rural life.  I lived out in the country until I went to college, and loved being outside, and his poems resonated a lot with me because of that.

Robert Frost and his poetry are often considered synonymous with New England life, but he was actually born in San Francisco, California!  However, his forebears were among the earliest settlers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  When Robert Frost was 11, his father died, and his mother had to borrow money to move the family back to Massachusetts to live with her family.  He grew up there with his sister, and published his first poem in his high school's magazine, as well as being voted Class Poet.  Robert and his future wife, Elinor White, were co-valedictorians for their high school class.

Robert attended college for just a couple of months, then left to get a job and work on his poetry.  He held a variety of jobs over the next few years, like working in a factory, delivering newspapers, and teaching school.  He first sold a poem in 1894, for $15 (almost $600 today), and was so excited about earning money with his poetry that he proposed to his girlfriend Elinor.  She turned him down because she was attending college and wanted to finish her degree before getting married.  Once she graduated, they were married in 1895.  Robert attended Harvard University for two years, but left when they learned Elinor was expecting their second child.  They had six children together, but only two outlived Robert and Elinor.

Robert's grandfather bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for Robert and his young family, and the Frosts settled down there.  Robert worked the farm and wrote poetry, but he couldn't make the farm pay enough to support them, so he took a series of teaching jobs at different New Hampshire schools.  In 1912, the Frosts moved to Great Britain, and Robert made friends with some important poets there, including Ezra Pound.  He published two collections of poetry there, then returned to New Hampshire when World War One started.  He bought a different farm there and really set about his life's work of writing and publishing poetry, teaching English at various colleges, and going on lecture tours.  That farm is now a museum and poetry center.

Over the course of his career, Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, more than any other American poet has ever been awarded.  He was named the United States Poet Laureate in 1958, and read some of his own poetry at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.  He died at the age of 88 in Boston, having outlived his wife and four of their children.  His life held a lot of sadness and loss, but he never lost his appreciation for the beauty in the world around him.  You will notice a lot of both those aspects of his life in his poetry.

Introducing Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was, by all accounts, eccentric.  

She was born into a prominent Massachusetts family in 1830, and had a pretty typical childhood and teen years for the daughter of a New England lawyer.  She attended a local school as a child, though she missed school periodically because she had a tendency to be sickly.  In her later teens, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the oldest women's colleges in the US.  She left college after less than a year and returned home, where she grew more and more reclusive.  By the end of her life, she refused to leave her bedroom at all, much less her home.  She also insisted on wearing only white for many years.  She sometimes refused to speak to people face-to-face, but would only talk to them through a closed door.  Definitely eccentric.

Emily Dickinson loved to write poetry -- we have almost 1800 of her poems still today!!!  She often sent poems to family and friends (she was also a prolific letter writer), but only ten of her poems were published while she was still alive.  Her sister Lavinia discovered a huge stash of poems after Emily died in 1886, and a heavily edited collection of them was published by some close friends.

The poems in that first collection were heavily edited because Emily Dickinson did not like to follow popular poetic conventions of the day, and she sometimes also didn't do things like capitalize the first word of a new line.  She loved dashes.  She wrote very short lines.  This seems pretty normal to us now, but at the time, it was new and weird and quirky.

It wasn't until 1955 that a full collection of her un-edited poetry was finally made available to the public. 

Dickinson loved the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well the poetry of her fellow American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Both Emerson and Dickinson are often considered American Romantic poets.  She also loved Shakespeare's writing, and liked Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte so much, she named her dog Carlo after a dog in the book.

The deaths of several close friends when she was a teen and young adult caused Dickinson a lot of distress.  Today, we would probably say she became clinically depressed, though in her time, she was just called "melancholy."  This was part of why she gradually became more and more reclusive.  Her poetry focuses a lot on death, beauty, nature, and sorrow.  

We don't know why Emily Dickinson eventually withdrew so much into herself.  People speculate she may have suffered from agoraphobia (severe anxiety caused by being outside the environment you consider safe, often leading to an inability to leave your home) or from a chronic disease like epilepsy that caused seizures or had embarrassing side effects like tremors.  But that is only speculation.  She died at age 55, in 1886, after suffering for several years from what her physician called Bright's Disease.

It's uncertain if Emily Dickinson was a Christian.  She did attend church as a child, and attended a revival in 1845 that made her briefly quite religiously zealous.  But she did not attend church services as an adult.  Some of her poems have deeply Christian subjects and themes, while others reflect the Transcendentalism philosophy.  Transcendentalism teaches that people are inherently good and can work to transcend the corrupting influences of society and other people and attain true goodness.  It was very popular in New England in the first half of the 1800s -- if it sounds familiar to you, it's probably because Louisa May Alcott and her family were Transcendentalists and she espouses that philosophy in Little Women.

Random fun fact: Taylor Swift is reportedly Emily Dickinson's sixth cousin, three times removed.

A Guest Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe

Surprise!  This week, our poet gets introduced by Sadie!  That's because she did a history project about him last year, so she knows more interesting facts about him than I do.  Take it away, Sadie!

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. In 1810, his father, David Poe, Jr., abandoned his family. About a year after that, Poe’s mother, Elizabeth Poe, died.

Poe was taken in by the Allan family, who lived in Richmond, Virginia. They never actually adopted him, but they served as a foster family. They are the reason his name became Edgar Allan Poe. In 1815, the Allans sailed to the United Kingdom and took Poe with them. Five years later, in 1820, they moved back to Richmond.

In 1836, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen at the time, and Poe was twenty-seven. Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, at the age of twenty-four.

Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective fiction genre, and he is the only American to have invented a book genre.

His short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” was first published in January, 1843. He was paid ten dollars for it, which would be about $300 today.

Poe was tending to his wife, who was dying of tuberculosis, while he was writing his famous poem “The Raven.” Initially, Poe debated whether the bird ought to be a raven or a parrot, before deciding that the colorful tropical bird wasn’t right for the poem.

“The Raven” was first published in 1845. It was rejected by George Rex Graham, the first publisher Poe approached, but Graham felt so bad about Poe’s lack of money that he gave Poe fifteen dollars anyway. The American Review paid him nine dollars for it.

Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849. He had been missing for a few days before reappearing in Baltimore incoherent and with no idea where he’d been for the past few days. He was wearing someone else’s clothes, and no one is certain what he died of. He was originally buried in the back corner of an obscure graveyard, but his body was later moved to a more prominent place that allowed for more visitors.

Introducing Robert Browning

This is going to be fairly short, since I shared a ton about Robert Browning in the post about his wife a couple weeks ago.

Robert Browning
(1812-1889)

Robert Browning was born into a well-to-do British family in 1812.  His father was a clerk for the Bank of England and a devoted reader -- he had about 6,000 books in his personal collection.  Robert's mother was a talented musician.  Both parents encouraged their two children to read and study the arts.

Robert began writing poetry at a very early age and finished his first whole book of poetry at age twelve.  No one would print it, so he destroyed it and began again.  He became enamored with the Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth, and his first published poem was written as an homage to Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.  That appeared in 1834, and he had some small success with poems and a few plays over the next ten years.  During this time, he continued to live at home once he had finished his boarding school education.

In 1845, he began corresponding with fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett, and they married in 1846.  The Brownings moved to Italy, where they lived mainly on the money Elizabeth had inherited from her grandmother.  Their only child, Robert Barrett "Pen" Browning, was born there.  

After Elizabeth died in 1861, Robert and Pen moved back to England.  Robert's younger sister moved in with them to keep house.  Robert was an outspoken abolitionist and was vocal in his support of the United States during their Civil War.  He also spoke and wrote against anti-Semitism and cruelty to animals.

Robert was raised a Protestant, but embraced atheism as a young man.  After marrying Elizabeth, who was a devout Christian, he appears to have returned to the faith, though he remained a critic of people who believed God existed simply because they were supposed to.

When he returned to England and settled in London, Robert's poetry career began to really take off.  Up until that time, his wife had been far more famous and celebrated than he was (in fact, she was a serious contender for being named Britain's next Poet Laureate for a while).  But in 1868, he published a book-length poem in blank verse, The Ring and the Book, which took him five years to write and polish, and it brought he immense attention and acclaim.  He spent the rest of his life traveling and writing poetry, and never remarried.  He died in his son Pen's home in Venice in 1889.

Most of Robert Browning's poems are "dramatic monologues," which means they're words spoken by some fictitious character to someone else.  During the poem, the speaker's attitudes and beliefs and personality are slowly revealed by what they say.  We'll be studying one of his most famous dramatic monologues this week.

I'll end this with something kind of random and cool: 

This is a cast of Elizabeth and Robert's hands made by the artist Harriet Goodhue Hosmer in 1853.  She later made several bronze and plaster sculptures from the original cast.  I find it really sweet and lovely, and it makes them feel very human and real, somehow.  To me, anyway! 

Introducing Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(If you saw this post in your inbox twice, that's because I accidentally published it Sunday afternoon instead of scheduling to post it on Monday.  So I unpublished it, and here it is again.  Not sure if that will make it show up in your email twice or what.  Sorry about that!)

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are one of my favorite literary couples :-D  This week, we'll talk about Elizabeth and her poetry, and then we'll focus on Robert next week.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in pastoral England to a wealthy family.  She enjoyed a happy and carefree childhood with reading books and playing with her eleven siblings.  She wrote her first poem when she was four years old; by the time she was ten, she was reading Shakespeare.  Her idyllically bookish childhood changed dramatically when she fell ill at the age of 15, possibly due to an injury to her spine.  She became a semi-invalid and suffered from neck and spine pain for the rest of her life.

In the 1830s, Elizabeth's father moved the family to London.  Her health was still not good, but she began having some of her poetry published in London periodicals.  She released her first book, The Seraphim and Other Poems, in 1838.  Reviews in both England and America were overwhelmingly positive, and her name became known among literary critics and readers alike.

In 1840, Elizabeth's favorite brother Edward, who was her best friend and favorite companion, drowned.  Elizabeth had been shy before, but she seems to have developed crippling social anxiety after Edward died.  She refused to make new friends and was afraid of meeting new people.  For several years, she barely ever left her room.  But she kept writing poetry and released her second collection, Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (her full maiden name was actually Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, but she liked to go by EBB).  It was a success too, and her name and work became even more well-known in literary society, even though she wasn't physically or emotionally able to mingle with those people.  In fact, Poems made her quite famous!

Elizabeth would have been considered well on her way to being a "spinster" or "old maid" by then because most women married in their early twenties and were considered "too old" to be eligible for marriage by the time they were thirty.  She seems to have resigned herself to living the rest of her life as a reclusive, unmarried invalid.  

During this time, Elizabeth did gradually make a few friends.  One was a famous writer named Mary Russell Mitford, and the other was John Kenyon, who was friends with many poets even though he wasn't a great writer himself.  Kenyon was a distant cousin of hers, and he helped her poetry become well-known among his friends even though Elizabeth herself couldn't mingle with society much.

In 1845, Poems was picked up, read, and loved by a young poet named Robert Browning.  Elizabeth was familiar with his poetry, and even mentioned him by name in one poem ("Lady Geraldine's Courtship") in her collection.  (I find this interesting: she only wrote that poem because Poems was to be printed in two volumes, and her publisher wanted the two volumes to be the same size, but she didn't have quite enough poems to make it work.  So she almost didn't mention Robert Browning in those poems at all!)  

Robert Browning became an instant fan of Elizabeth's.  In fact, he wrote her a fan letter that began, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," and ended with, “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.”  :-o

Well, Elizabeth wrote back.  Robert wrote her again.  A flurry of letters passed between them (and the mail in Victorian England was very efficient, so they didn't have to wait days or weeks to get letters the way you might imagine).  Robert Browning was six years younger than Elizabeth Barrett, healthy and energetic and not-yet-famous.  Within months, John Kenyon arranged for them to meet in person... but secretly!  Elizabeth's father was kind of creepily controlling and tried to make all of his children rely on him for financial and emotional support all their lives.  Elizabeth was sure her father wouldn't like her having a suitor, and might even forbid her to see Robert again.  The two had fallen in love via their letters, and meeting in person cemented their devotion to each other.  

During this secret courtship, Elizabeth composed some of her most famous poems.  She would later publish many of them in the collection Sonnets from the Portuguese, which is one of the most enduringly popular collections of poetry of all time.  They are love poems filled with longing, hope, fear, and wonder.  She was an invalid spinster, and he was a healthy and promising younger man -- they didn't seem like a good match to the outside world, and she knew it.

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning got married in secret on September 12, 1846.  Elizabeth continued living at home with her father for the following week, while Robert made arrangements for their honeymoon trip to Europe.  Then, Elizabeth simply left home.  The Brownings traveled in Europe for a time before settling down in Florence.  They would consider Florence their home for the rest of Elizabeth's life.  Elizabeth's father disinherited her when he learned of her marriage, and they never reconciled.

In Florence, Elizabeth and Robert both continued to write poetry.  Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (called "Pen"), was born there in 1849.  That same year, Elizabeth finally published Sonnets from the Portuguese.  She selected that title partly so it would seem like she might have simply translated the poems from another language, as a sort of way to distance herself from the intensely personal nature of most of the poems.  But it was also a joke between herself and her husband -- one of Elizabeth's poems from Poems, "Catarina to Camoens," is about a woman named Catarina who makes a deathbed declaration of love for a Portuguese poet named Camoens.  Ever since Robert Browning first read that poem of hers, before he even met her, he had thought of Elizabeth as the real Catarina, so he called her "the Portuguese" as a nickname.

Elizabeth's other major work is a long narrative poem in blank verse, Aurora Leigh, which she released in 1857.  She was intensely interested in social issues such as slavery, human rights, women's rights, and political freedom.  Italian politics became a kind of obsession for her while living in Florence, and she wrote many poems about it.

Although her health improved greatly after she married Robert and moved away from her father's repressive home, Elizabeth was never truly strong.  In 1861, when she was only fifty-five years old, she grew continually weaker and died in June following a severe cold.  She died in her husband's arms, and he said that she died smiling and happy.  Robert and Pen moved back to London after her death.  The literary community as a whole mourned her loss, and various literary journals and critics called her the greatest woman poet in the history of English literature!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry was popular with readers and critics alike while she lived.  It was influential among her fellow poets, too -- for instance, her poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" was so inspiring to Edgar Allan Poe that he borrowed its meter and rhythm for his poem "The Raven."  In a newspaper review, Poe said that "Her sense of Art is pure in itself," and he even dedicated his poetry collection The Raven and Other Poems to her.  Her poetry also heavily influenced and inspired Emily Dickinson.  We'll study poems by both of them in the coming months.

Introducing Phyllis Wheatley

Phyllis Wheatley
(~1753-1784)

Phyllis (sometimes spelled Phillis) Wheatley (sometimes spelled Wheatly) is generally considered America's first African-American author of a book of poetry.  She was born in West Africa around the year 1753, and kidnapped and sold (by a local chief) into slavery when she was seven or eight years old.  She was taken to North America by slave traders and sold to John Wheatley, a wealthy Boston merchant.  He bought the girl to be a house slave for his wife Susanna, who named her Phillis/Phyllis after the slave ship that brought her across the ocean.  They gave her their last name, which was customary for slaves.

Mary and Nathaniel Wheatley, the family's teen daughter and son, taught Phyllis to read and write (historical note: it wasn't always illegal during US history to teach slaves to read and write -- that was only a law in specific places during the mid-1800s).  John Wheatley was well known as a progressive-thinking man who tried to help his slaves better themselves -- and not only his male slaves, but the female ones too!  In fact, Phyllis learned not only to read and write English, but also Greek and Latin.  She received a far better education than many free boys and girls.

The family discovered Phyllis had a talent for writing poetry, and they encouraged her to pursue this.  As she became a more accomplished poet, they gradually stopped having her do other work so she would have more time to learn and write.

Some people refused to believe that a former slave could have written beautiful poetry.  Phyllis Wheatley actually had to go to court in 1772 to defend her statements claiming to have written her own poems.  Although the court ruled that she was obviously the author of her poems, every publisher in Boston refused to publish her book of poems.  So, John and Susanna paid for Phyllis to travel all the way to England with their son Nathaniel to try having her poetry book published there.  Phyllis met with several famous and influential writers and critics there, and her poems were published in London in 1773.  The Wheatley family granted Phyllis her freedom soon after that.  She continued to live with the Wheatley family until after Susanna and John both died.  Then Phyllis marred a grocer named John Peters.

Sadly, John Peters was not good with money, and he was thrown into prison for debt in 1784.  Phyllis had to support herself and their young child, so she took a job as a scullery maid.  She had suffered from asthma all her life, and she contracted pneumonia while working in a damp kitchen and died when she was only 31, shortly after giving birth to a baby girl, who died the same day as Phyllis.

The Wheatley family also taught her Phyllis about the God of the Bible, and she became a Christian.  Many of her poems have deep Christian themes.  Others are patriotic -- she wrote a poem called "To His Excellency, George Washington" in 1775.  General Washington liked it so much, he invited her to visit him at his military headquarters.  We have fifty-five of her poems still in existence today, and twenty of them are elegies, which are poems that speak about death -- Phyllis uses hers to comfort people with reminders of eternal life in heaven.

Although she died young and poor, Phyllis Wheatley was actually fairly famous during her lifetime.  Voltaire, a very famous French writer in that era, was a fan of her poetry.  American naval hero John Paul Jones sent her some of his favorite poems that he thought she might enjoy.  John Newton (the guy who wrote "Amazing Grace") discussed her poetry in letters with his friends.  Her poetry can feel very old-fashioned and stylized to us, but it was considered exciting and fresh when she was writing it.

Introducing William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
1770-1850

William Wordsworth's name always makes me chuckle because he's a writer, so he knows what words are worth.  He was born in northern England, in the Lake District, which is where Elizabeth Bennet goes on vacation in Pride and Prejudice.  Check out this amazing view -- you can see why people went there on vacations!  Here's another.  No wonder Wordsworth wrote so much about the natural world's beauty!  I mean, honestly, no wonder Elizabeth Bennet rhapsodized about the rocks and mountains.

Okay, so, Wordsworth is one of the two English poets who started the Romantic Movement -- the other is Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  (I like Wordsworth's poetry a bit better than Coleridge's, so I picked him for you to study, and you're stuck with him.)  Wordsworth and Coleridge published a poetry book together in 1798, Lyrical Ballads, and it kind of kicked off the Romantic Movement (also called Romanticism and the Romantic Era).  This is big-R Romantic, which is all about reveling in and appreciation the beauty of nature, idealizing heroism, and being fascinated by anything exotic or mysterious, even supernatural.  It really doesn't have anything to do with romantic love, but instead is a sort of reaction against the Industrial Revolution -- it prefers natural landscapes and rustic beauty to cities, factories, anything involving gears and machinery.  You can learn more about it here on Wikipedia if you wish.

You're going to notice a lot of that in Wordsworth's poetry -- lots of loving nature, valuing simplicity, and celebrating imagination.  Think of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility -- she is like a personification of the big-R Romantic Movement.  Wordsworth doesn't get mentioned in that book, but I'm sure Marianne was a fan of his too, since S&S was published in 1811, when the Romantic Movement was really getting rolling.

Part of the Romantic ideal for writing is to focus on everyday life, and the common people.  Instead of using flowery or high-toned language, they use ordinary words and try to make their poetry sound as natural as possible.  There's still a lot of rhyming going on in that era, but you won't find loads of fancy words.

Discussion Questions:

1.  Have you read anything of Wordsworth's before, that you're aware of?

2.  Have you learned about the Romantic Movement before?  Do you know anything more about it that you'd like to share here?

Introducing William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
1564-1616

You have obviously heard of William Shakespeare before.  Why can I assume that?  Because a) your parents aren't uncultured swine, and b) he's generally regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language.  In fact, it's thanks to William Shakespeare plus the King James translation of the Bible that English has not morphed into something totally different over the past four hundred years.  

In the centuries before Shakespeare, English changed greatly -- only two hundred years separate Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from Shakespeare, but can you read and understand this?

At nyght were come into that hostelrye 

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye 

Of sondry folk, by áventure y-falle 

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle, 

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde. 

The chambres and the stables weren wyde, 

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

You can kinda get the gist of it, right?  Sorta?  I mean, Canturbury Tales was written around the year 1400, and that's a long time ago, so it's not weird that our language has changed that much in 600 years, right?

But compare that section to this one from Shakespeare's Julius Caeser, which was written around the year 1600:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; 

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. 

The evil that men do lives after them; 

The good is oft interred with their bones; 

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus 

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: 

If it were so, it was a grievous fault, 

And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.

Have any trouble deciphering that?  Are those words spelled strangely?  That's from 400 years ago, but because Shakespeare's works have been continuously and widely read, and continuously and widely performed, English has remained basically unchanged since his time.  (And the King James translation of the Bible, which is from right around 1600 too, played an equally big part in that.)  

Anyway, we're beginning our journey through poetry with Shakespeare because we can still understand his writing perfectly well, and because he has influenced our language so profoundly.  And because he wrote wonderful poems.  I'll be sharing some of his sonnets this week, and also some bits of his plays that are written as poetry.

Discussion Questions:

1.  Have you ever read Shakespeare's writing before?  If so, what?

2.  Have you seen any of Shakespeare's plays performed, on a stage or on film?