Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...speeches are less coherent, relying on pretty metaphors rather than cogent messages. Speaking at the Juilliard School, Jane Alexander, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, made a hazy comparison between life and sailing. "You chart a trek where no one's sailed before," she said, quoting the poet Samuel Hazo. "You rig. You anchor Up. You said." A nice almost inspirational image, but not very useful advice to the Class...
Most of the time, the dapper Ellison got along with blacks and whites. He was the precocious child of doting parents in Oklahoma City. "I'm raising this boy to be a poet," said Ellison's father, a small businessman who named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson and died when the child was three. Ralph's mother worked as a domestic and recruited blacks for the Socialist Party. There was no shortage of role models for Ralph; he attended a grammar school named for Frederick Douglass and won a scholarship to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. While...
...seemed in many ways the odd woman out among her generation of U.S. poets, and not only because of her gender. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) suffered none of the public breakdowns, burnouts and crack-ups that afflicted such talented contemporaries as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Theodore Roethke. "You are the soberest poet we've had here yet," a secretary at the University of Washington once told her; she cherished the comment and repeated it to others. Bishop's public image seemed serene -- photographs taken well into her middle years invariably show small features arranged impassively...
Bishop knew even before college that she would be a poet, and the task she set herself while at Vassar -- "to develop a manner of one's own, to say the most difficult things and to be funny if possible" -- remained the same throughout her career. She sought out Marianne Moore as a mentor, but she did not always take the older poet's technical advice: "I'm afraid I was quite ungracious in that I accepted most of your suggestions but refused some -- that seems almost worse than refusing all assistance...
Books: Elizabeth Bishop's letters trace a poet's life...