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Penguin Modern Poets
''Penguin Modern Poets'' was a series of 27 poetry books published by Penguin Books in the 1960s and 1970s, each containing work by three contemporary poets (mostly but not exclusively British and American). The series was begun in 1962 and published an average of two volumes per year throughout the 1960s. Each volume was stated to be "an attempt to introduce contemporary poetry to the general reader". The series added up to a substantial survey of English-language poetry of the time. ''Penguin Modern Poets'' was the first venture on the part of Penguin Books to offer contemporary poetry. Although at the time, most poetry was published in expensive hardbound editions, ''Penguin Modern Poets'' offered the public samplers of modern verse in inexpensive paperbacks. No. 27, the last of the original series, appeared in 1979.Booth, Martin (1985). ''British Poetry 1964 to 1984: Driving Through the Barricades'', p. 64. Routledge. . The outstanding success of the series was No. 10, which, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the '' Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. The author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, ''A Coney Island of the Mind'' (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day". Early life Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York. Shortly before his birth, his father, Carlo, a native of Brescia, died of a heart attack; and his mother, Clemence Albertine (née Mendes-Monsanto), of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent, was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. He was raised by an aunt, and later by foster parents. He attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary's General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards that Williams walked". Life and career Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. His father, William George Williams, was born in England but raised from the age of 5 in the Dominican Republic; his mother, Raquel Hélène Hoheb, from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, was of French extraction. Scholars note that the Caribbean culture of the family home had an important influence on Williams. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "English was not h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by ''Time'' magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Early life Rexroth was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia Reed. His childhood was troubled by his father's alcoholism and his mother's chronic illness. His mother died in 1916 and his father in 1919, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago. At age nineteen, he hitchhiked across the country, taking odd jobs and working a stint as a Forest Service trail cr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denise Levertov
Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni (1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London. His daughter wrote, "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stevie Smith
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, '' Stevie'' by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson. Life Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith.(Couzyn, Jeni 1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p. 32. She was called "Peggy" within her family, but acquired the name "Stevie" as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue. Her father was a shipping agent, a business that he had inherited from his father. As the company and his marriage began to fall apart, he ran away to sea and Smith saw very little of him after that. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Hill
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL (18 June 1932 – 30 June 2016) was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language."Harold Bloom, ed. ''Geoffrey Hill (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)'', Infobase Publishing, 1986. From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his ''Collected Critical Writings'', and the publication of ''Broken Hierarchies (Poems 1952–2012)'', Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Biography Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England, in 1932, the son of a police constable. When he was six, his family ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edwin Brock
Edwin Brock (19 October 1927 – 7 September 1997) was a British poet. Brock published ten volumes of poetry from 1959 through his death in 1997. Two of Brock's poems In particular -- ''Five Ways to Kill a Man'' (1972) and ''Song of the Battery Hen'' (1977) -- have been heavily anthologized. Early life Brock was born in Dulwich, London, in 1927. He grew up in a working-class family with no literary aspirations. He won a scholarship to a local grammar school but his formal education ended after he gained his School Certificate. Brock's interest in poetry was inspired by a paperback anthology of modern verse which he picked up idly as a bored 18-year-old, waiting to be de-mobbed from the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War. This chance encounter in Hong Kong was to prove revelatory and from then on Brock, completely self-taught, began to write his own poems. Professional life Gradually Brock started to be published, firstly in the smaller magazines and eventual ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nathaniel Tarn
Nathaniel Tarn (born June 30, 1928) is a French-American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. He was born in Paris to a French-Romanian mother and a British- Lithuanian father. He lived in Paris until the age of seven, then in Belgium until age 11; when World War II began, the family moved to England. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at several American universities, primarily Rutgers, where he was a professor from 1972 until 1985. He has lived outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, since his retirement from Rutgers. Education Tarn was educated at Lycée d'Anvers and Clifton College and graduated with degrees in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l'Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Smith-Mundt-Fulbright grant took him to the University of Chicago; he did fieldwork for his doctorate in anthropology w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jon Silkin
Jon Silkin (2 December 1930 – 25 November 1997) was a British poet. Early life Jon Silkin was born in London, in a Litvak Jewish family, his parents were Joseph Silkin and Doris Rubenstein. His grandparents were all from the Lithuanian- part of the Russian Empire. His uncle was Lewis Silkin, 1st Baron Silkin. He was named Jon after Jon Forsyte in ''The Forsyte Saga'', and attended Wycliffe College and Dulwich College During the Second World War he was one of the children evacuated from London (in his case, to Wales); he remembered that he "roamed the countryside incessantly" while in Wales, collecting "fool's gold" and exploring old Roman mines. For a period of about six years in the 1950s, after National Service, he supported himself by manual labour and other menial jobs. By 1956 he rented the top-floor flat at 10, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead, (), the house of Bernice Rubens, who later won the Booker Prize, and her husband Rudolph Nassauer, also a published novelist, later. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Murphy (poet)
Richard Kerr Murphy (6 August 1927 – 30 January 2018) was an Anglo-Irish poet. Biography Early years Murphy was born to an Anglo-Irish family at Milford House, near the Mayo-Galway border, in 1927. He spent much of his early childhood in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where his father William Lindsay Murphy served in the Colonial Service and was active as mayor of Colombo, later becoming Governor General of the Bahamas (in succession to the Duke of Windsor). Murphy received his education at the King's School, Canterbury and Wellington College. He won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford at the age of 17, where he studied English under C.S. Lewis. He was later educated at the Sorbonne, and ran a school in Crete between 1953 and 1954. In his ''Archaeology of Love'' (1955), Murphy reflects on his experiences in England and Continental Europe. His childhood in Ireland was documented in the film ''The Other Irish Travellers'', made by his niece Fiona Murphy. Return to Ireland In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack Clemo
Reginald John Clemo (11 March 1916 – 25 July 1994) was a British poet and writer who was strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his strong Christian belief. His work was considered to be visionary and inspired by the rugged Cornish landscape. He was the son of a clay-kiln worker and his mother, Eveline Clemo (née Polmounter, died 1977), was a dogmatic nonconformist. Early life Clemo was born in the parish of St Stephen-in-Brannel near St Austell. His father was killed at sea towards the end of the First World War and he was raised by his mother, who exerted a dominant influence on him. He was educated at the village school but after age of 13 his formal schooling ceased with the onset of his blindness. He became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. The china clay mines and works around which he grew up were to feature strongly in his work. Literary career Clemo's early work was published in the local press but his literary breakthrough ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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