Tag: Pulitzer Prize Winning Poets

Meet the Poets: Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks – Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1950 and Poet Laureate of the United States of America 1985

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Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 17, 1917 in Topeka Kansas. She was the older of two children born to Keziah and David Brooks. The same year of her birth she and her family moved to Chicago where she has resided her entire life.

Brooks’ mother discovered her gift for writing at the early age of seven. She promptly encouraged this talent by exposing Gwendolyn to various forms of literature. Her parents, however were very strict and she was not allowed to play with the kids in the neighborhood.

As a child she lacked the sass and brass of the other girls in her class and became very isolated. As a result, she made few friends while in school. When Brooks was at home in her room she often created a world of her own by reading and writing stories and poetry.

Due to her lack of social skills she became very shy and continued to be shy throughout her adult life. After graduating from high school she went on to Wilson Junior College and graduated in 1936. In 1939 she was married to Henry Blakely and they had two children, Henry junior and Nora Blakely. In 1945 Gwendolyn Brooks’ first book entitled A Street In Bronzeville was published. In 1949 Annie Allen was published and received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, becoming the first African American to receive this prestigious award in poetry. In 1953 Brooks’ first novel is published Maud Martha. In 1963 she published Selected Poems and secured her first teaching job at Chicago’s Columbia College.

In 1967 at the Fisk University Writers Conference in Nashville, Brooks met the new black revolution. She came from South Dakota State College, which was all white, where she was received with love. Now she had arrived at an all black college where she was now coldly respected. After this trip Brooks says that she is no longer asleep she is now awake. After 1967 she became aware that other blacks feel that way and are not hesitant about saying it. She appeals to her people for understanding and is more conscious of them in her writing. In 1968 she published her next major collection of poetry, In the Mecca. The effect of her awakening is noticeable in her poetry. Brooks is less concerned with poetic form, and uses mostly free verse.

In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois and was also the first African American to receive an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1976. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (commonly known as United States Poet Laureate) in 1985. Since then, Gwendolyn Brooks has gone on to receive over fifty honorary doctorates from numerous colleges and universities.

Brooks died of cancer at the age of 83 on December 3, 2000, at her home on Chicago’s South Side. She is buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.

Source: http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/gb/Gwendolyn4.html
For more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks

Meet the Poets: Audrey Wurdemann – 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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“I walk in ambush bright
With terror and delight,
The savage lovely beast
Pacing within my breast,
The proud heart being more
Proud than it was before
For having in its hold
A prize of living gold.” — from Bright Ambush by Audrey Wurdemann

Audrey Wurdemann (January 1, 1911 – May 20, 1960) was an American poet. She was the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry at the age of 24, for her collection Bright Ambush. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Percy Bysshe Shelley (see note below). She never attended grammar school, and entered high school at the age of 11.

Her first collection of poetry, ‘The House of Silk’ was published when she was 16, sponsored by California poet George Sterling. She was a 1931 honors graduate of the University of Washington. After college she traveled through Asia.

She married poet and novelist Joseph Auslander in 1932 and moved to New York City, where he taught at Columbia. They moved to Washington, DC when Auslander was appointed the first Poet Laureate Consultant in poetry of the Library of Congress; they lived at 3117 35th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., in the Cathedral Heights neighborhood.

She subsequently collaborated with him on the novels My Uncle Jan and The Islanders. They spent their last years living in Coral Gables, Florida.
Her work appeared in Harper’s, and Poetry magazine. Their papers are held at the University of Miami.

Her husband was Joseph Auslande, the first person to serve as Poet Consultant at the Library of Congress and the longest serving (1937 to 1941). Auslander published six volumes of poems; his best known is The Unconquerables (1943), poems addressed to the German-occupied countries of Europe.

Note: Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. The novelist Mary Shelley (née Godwin) was his second wife.

For more information on Audrey Wurdemann see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Wurdemann and http://dcwriters.poetrymutual.org/pages/auslander-wurdemann.html

Meet the Poets: Amy Lawrence Lowell – 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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“A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.” — Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Paul Lauter says of Lowell “. . . becomes interesting in our conflicted and tense cultural moment because she was not in any sense ‘free’ either to express her sexuality or to police it. She could not have the confidence—or perhaps bravado—of overseas 1920s lesbian communities, or even of the more modest bohemianism of the Village. On the contrary, at the center of many of her most interesting poems, like ‘Venus Transiens,’ are painfully contradictory impulses toward revelation, display, or even a certain form of ‘flaunting,’ and hiding, a poetics of the closet.”

from “Amy Lowell and Cultural Borders.” In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Copyright 1997 by The University of Georgia Press.

Source: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/about.htm

For more information on Amy Lowell: http://poems.writers-network.com/poet/amy-lowell-29.

 

 

 

Meet the Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson – 1922, 1925 and 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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“And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.”
— Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 – April 6, 1935) was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times: in 1922 for his first Collected Poems, in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice, and in 1928 for Tristram.

Much of Robinson’s poetry contemplates the problem of how the self might separate itself from a rigid society, yet remain as a tutelary spirit. In the end Robinson’s decision would seem to have been that this could best be done by eschewing the dramatic catastrophes–vengeance, martyrdom–and offering instead temperate ironies, cool understatements and a language calculated, like Wordsworth’s, to heal. This decision, as one looks back now from the present with its poetry of scrimshaw, its poetry of sociology, requires one to say that Robinson chose not to write for any particular time, for “any particular time” likes to have salt in its wounds. Equally it requires that one say that Robinson wrote for all time, for “all time” wants to be made healthy and to survive. — Radcliffe Squires from Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays. Ed. Ellsworth Barnard. Copyright © 1969 by the University of Georgia Press.

For more information on Edwin Arlington Robinson see: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/robinson/about.htm

Meet the Poets: Robert Frost – 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” — Robert Frost.

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work often employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to look at complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of his generation, Frost was honored often during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943). He was the 1958 and 1959 United States Poet Laureate.

Your can read more about Robert Frost at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost.

Photo credit: The picture is of Robert Frost, American poet, taken in 1941.The source is the Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. The photographer was Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer. “No copyright restriction known. Staff photographer reproduction rights transferred to Library of Congress through Instrument of Gift.”

Meet the Poets: James Merrill – 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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“Free me, I pray, to go in search of joys
Unembroidered by your high, soft voice,
Along that stony path the senses pave.”
— James Merrill.

James Merrill was an American poet. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist (if deeply emotional) lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.

Beginning with the prestigious Glascock Prize, awarded for “The Black Swan” when he was an undergraduate, Merrill would go on to receive every major poetry award in the United States, including the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies. Merrill was honored in mid-career with the Bollingen Prize in 1973. He would receive the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover (composed partly of supposedly supernatural messages received via the use of a Ouija board). In 1990, he received the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress for The Inner Room. He garnered the National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1967 for Nights and Days and in 1979 for Mirabell: Books of Number. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.

You can read about James Merrill at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Merrill