—
Born: May 16, 1929, Baltimore Died: March 27, 2012,
Poet, activist, and MacArthur “genius.” Adrienne Rich was born in 84 years ago today. In 1997 she turned down the National Medal for the Arts in a protest against the disparity of justice in America.
— Ezra Pound
On April 18, 1958, poet Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane He had been arrested during World War II for making speeches on Italian radio in praise of fascism and anti-Semitism; friends and fellow poets like Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot deplored his actions but campaigned for his release.
It’s the birthday of Robert Frost born 1874 in San Francisco. He moved to Massachusetts when he was 11.
He struggled a long time to become a successful poet. His style was out of fashion almost from the beginning — he was interested in the traditional forms of rhyme and meter, while his contemporaries such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot were writing in modern free verse. He was 39 when he published his first collection of poems, A Boy’s Will (1913), and it was a major success
It’s the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York (1919). Ferlinghetti went to college at the University of North Carolina, and then joined the Navy during World War II. After the war, he went to the Sorbonne, and then settled in San Francisco. He loved the North Beach neighborhoo, full of Italian immigrants, and he decided to open a bookstore there. In 1953, he opened City Lights, a bookstore and publishing house, which made its name printing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Ferlinghetti did not publish his own book, 
has received the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the first Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation. He is the subject of Christopher Felver’s new film documentary, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Say what you will about Henry and his poetry, but he was the first American writer to earn a living from royalties. So there.
— W.H. Auden
— Anne Sexton, in a letter dated 3-July-1964 to Anne Clarke
(Source: yearsofmagicalthinking, via kdecember)
“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light!”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was born on this day in 1892 in Rockland, Maine.
After being educated at Vassar, she moved to Greenwich Village and lived a Jazz Age Bohemian life, which revolved around poetry and love affairs. She was beautiful and alluring and many men and women fell in love with her. Critic Edmund Wilson asked her to marry him. She said no. He later reflected that falling in love with her “was so common an experience, so almost inevitable a consequence of knowing her in those days.”
“Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!”
W.H. Auden said that the aspiring poets who wanted to write poetry because they had “something important to say” were probably hopeless.
On the other hand, if they said they just “liked to hang around words and overhear them talking,” they had a chance.
— Charles Simic, A Year in Fragments
—
Edgar Allan Poe
The American writer was born on this day in 1809.
Even non-readers know Poe, if only for his odd life story or because they had to read something like his poem “The Raven.”
In that poem, a young man mourns the death of his lover, Lenore. He is visited by a raven on a December night that speaks to him and leads him into madness.
In his real life, Poe was writing the poem while his own young wife, Virginia, was slowly dying of tuberculosis. She died in 1847.
“The Raven” appeared in journals throughout the country and it was such a rousing success that Wiley and Putnam published two of Poe’s books that year: a collection of prose called Tales and also The Raven and Other Poems (1845). It was his first book of poetry in 14 years.
His first published poems were an anonymous collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827 which was credited only to “a Bostonian”.
Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.
Following the example of Dickens and other Europeans, he was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone. He was only mildly successful in that pursuit and he had a financially difficult life and career.
— Carl Sandburg
— Rainer Maria Rilke, “You Who Never Arrived”
(Source: larmoyante, via kdecember)
