Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings and W.H. Auden

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Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings and
W.H. Auden
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Emily Dickinson, 183086

• American poet, b. Amherst, MA. Considered one of
  the greatest poets in American literature. Stands
  outside the mainstream of 19th-century American
  literature (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman,
  Longfellow).
• Before she was 30, she began to withdraw from
  village activities and gradually ceased to leave
  home at all. Often fled from visitors and
  eventually lived as a virtual recluse.
• Dickinson published only seven poems during her
  lifetime. After her death in 1886, her sister
  Lavinia Dickinson discovered over 1,000 poems in
  her bureau.
• The chief tension in her work comes from her
  inability to accept the orthodox religious faith
  of her day and her longing for its spiritual
  comfort. Immortality she called the flood
  subject, and she alternated confident statements
  of belief with lyrics of despairing uncertainty
  that were both reverent and rebellious.
• Her verse, noted for its aphoristic style, its
  wit, its delicate metrical variation and
  irregular rhymes, its directness of statement,
  and its bold and startling imagery, has won
  enormous acclaim and had a great influence on
  20th-century poetry.

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Dylan Thomas, 191453

• Welsh poet, Eighteen Poems (1934) created
  controversy but won him immediate fame, which
  grew with the publication of Twenty-five Poems
  (1936), The Map of Love (1939 containing poetry
  and surrealistic prose), The World I Breathe
  (1939 also containing some prose), Deaths and
  Entrances (1946), and In Country Sleep and Other
  Poems (1952).
• The prose Thomas published is fragmented into
  stories and sketches, many auto- or
  pseudo-autobiographical, all touched with fantasy
  and are collected in Portrait of the Artist as a
  Young Dog (1940), Adventures in the Skin Trade,
  and Quite Early One Morning (1955).
• Thomass themes are traditionallove, death,
  mutabilityand over the years he seemed to pass
  from religious doubt to joyous faith in God. His
  complex imagery is based on many sources,
  including Welsh legend, Christian symbolism,
  witchcraft, astronomy, and Freudian psychology

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Villanelle (Italian villa)

• Traditional poetic form that entered
  English-language poetry in the late 1800s from
  the imitation of French models.
• 19 lines long, but only uses two rhymes
• First five stanzas are triplets, last stanza is a
  quatrain such that the rhyme scheme is as
  follows aba aba aba aba aba abaa
• Repeats two lines throughout the poem (refrains).
  Line 1 is repeated as Line 6, 12 and 18 Line 3
  repeated as Lines 9,15,19
• Lines 18-19 make a rhymed couplet.

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e.e. cummings (edward estlin)

• Edward Estlin Cummings, poet, playwright,
  novelist, and painter, b. October 14, 1894, in
  Cambridge, MA, d. September 3, 1962
• Received his A.B. and M.A. from Harvard Univ in
  1915 16
• Service in France in 1917 but was arrested on
  suspicion of treason and interned for some
  months. After his release, he served U.S. Army as
  a private in 1918-19.
• Autobiographical story of his time in the
  internment camp, The Enormous Room (1922),
  received widespread praise.
• First book of poetry, Tulips Chimneys (1923),
  showed an unusual style that was not to change
  for 40 years.
• Though as eccentric in prose as in verse,
  Cummings became Charles Eliot Norton Professor of
  Poetry, Harvard Univ., in 1952-53.

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W.H. Auden (Wystan Hugh)

• Anglo-American poet, 1907-1973, moved to America
  in 1939 Chancellor of The Academy of American
  Poets from 1954 to 1973
• influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and
  Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily
  Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Leader of a left-wing literary group lived in
  Germany in the early days of Nazism and was a
  stretcher-bearer in the Spanish Civil-war
• Poems, published in 1930, established him as the
  leading voice of a new generation.
• He has been admired for his unsurpassed technical
  virtuosity and an ability to write poems in
  nearly every imaginable verse form
• His work incorporates popular culture, current
  events, and vernacular speech he drew from an
  extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms,
  social/political theories, and scientific and
  technical information.