American Literature Research Starter: American Poets

Poems, autobiographies, plays; news editor. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou is a prolific autobiographer, poet, and writer.

English-born US poet. He wrote some of his most original poetry, such as Look, Stranger! (1936), in the 1930s when he led the influential left-wing literary group that included the writers Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis.

From Encyclopedia of African-American Literature
American poet, children's fiction writer; also known as Thelma Lucille Sayles. Born in 1936 in Depew, New York, to Samuel L. Sayles, a steel worker, and Thelma Moore Sayles, a homemaker, poet Lucille Clifton grew up in Depew and Buffalo, a child of the Great Migration of southern blacks to the industrial North. Blackness and femaleness are at one with her art's humanity. Clifton asks us to see individual experience, race, and gender not as qualifiers limiting a person's ability to relate to others but as revelations of selfhood that open up new possibilities of communication, communion, and collective action.

1830–86, American poet, b. Amherst, Mass. She is widely considered one of the greatest poets in American literature.

American-born British critic and writer whose poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) established him as a major literary figure.

American poet, b. San Francisco. Perhaps the most popular and beloved of 20th-century American poets.

Poet, writer, playwright, and librettist, born in Joplin, Missouri, USA.

One of the outstanding poets of her generation, Sylvia Plath became a heroine to many feminist readers with her intense and harrowing work. She was married to Ted Hughes, the future poet laureate, who edited her Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems after her suicide.

Poet and writer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

1885–1972, American poet, critic, and translator, b. Hailey, Idaho, grad. Hamilton College, 1905, M.A. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1906.

American poet and essayist whose works, notably Diving Into the Wreck (1973), concern radical feminism, lesbianism, and political activism.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
American poet, b. Saginaw, Mich., educated at the Univ. of Michigan and Harvard. A poet of the Midwest, Roethke combined a love of the land with his vision of the development of the individual.

American poet whose works, including the collections Live or Die (1966) and The Death Notebooks (1974), document her struggle with mental illness and her search for faith.

American poet whose artful and innovative works, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning” (both 1923), concern the role of imagination in bringing order to a chaotic world.

American poet, b. West Hills, N.Y. Considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets, Walt Whitman celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man.