154 articles
Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) was an American poet and translator who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, served as the second US Poet Laureate, and was the celebrated English translator of Molière.
Richmond Lattimore
Richmond Alexander Lattimore (1906–1984) was an American poet, classicist, and Bryn Mawr professor of Greek, known for his line-for-line verse translations of Homer's Iliad (1951) and Odyssey (1967) and the Complete Greek Tragedies.
Rita Dove
Rita Dove is an American poet who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah and served as US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995.
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley (1926–2005) was an American poet, editor, and teacher associated with the Black Mountain poets, known for a compressed, elliptical style that influenced a generation.
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan was an American poet, born in Oakland in 1919, identified with Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance and known for poems drawing on myth and the occult.
Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1874–1963), American poet of New England rural life; author of A Boy's Will, North of Boston, and The Road Not Taken; four Pulitzer Prizes and Kennedy's inaugural poem.
Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden (Asa Bundy Sheffey, 1913–1980), American poet and first African American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress; wrote "Middle Passage" and "Frederick Douglass"; won the 1966 Dakar grand prize for A Ballad of Remembrance.
Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell (1917–1977), American poet and Pulitzer winner; his 1959 Life Studies launched confessional poetry. Also known for Lord Weary's Castle, Imitations, and Day by Day.
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989), American poet, novelist, critic, and first U.S. poet laureate; author of All the King's Men and, with Cleanth Brooks, Understanding Poetry; only writer to win Pulitzers in both fiction and poetry.
Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was an American poet who built his fame on long narrative poems set on the Carmel–Big Sur coast of California and formulated the philosophy of Inhumanism.
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman (born 1946 in Pasco, Washington) is an American poet, critic, and editor who is one of the founders of Language poetry, known for the new sentence and the long poem Ketjak.
Rose Styron
Rose Styron (Rose Burgunder Styron), American poet, journalist, translator, and human rights activist; Wellesley 1950; founding member of Amnesty International USA; married William Styron in Rome, 1953; memoir Beyond This Harbor (2023).
Rupi Kaur (ਰੂਪੀ ਕੌਰ)
Rupi Kaur (ਰੂਪੀ ਕੌਰ), born 1992, is a Canadian poet and illustrator whose self-published 2014 debut, milk and honey, made her the face of Instapoetry.
Simon J. Ortiz
Simon J. Ortiz, born 1941 at McCarty's, New Mexico, is an Acoma Pueblo poet known for From Sand Creek and Woven Stone, major works of the Native American Renaissance.
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) was an American poet from Worcester, Massachusetts, who won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize and became the tenth US Poet Laureate at age ninety-five.
Sterling Allen Brown
Sterling Allen Brown (1901-1989), American poet, Howard University professor, folklorist, and critic; author of Southern Road (1932) and The Negro Caravan (1941); Lenore Marshall Prize 1982, D.C. poet laureate 1984.
Susan Howe
Susan Howe, born in Boston in 1937, is an American poet and scholar associated with Language writing whose work draws on early American history and archives.
Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson
Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson (1830–1913), Emily Dickinson's sister-in-law and closest reader, received nearly 500 writings from the poet, wrote her obituary, began editing her first volume, and was marginalized by Mabel Loomis Todd's rival edition.
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), American confessional poet and novelist, author of The Colossus, The Bell Jar, and posthumous Ariel; married Ted Hughes, died by suicide at 30, won a posthumous Pulitzer.
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888–1965), St. Louis-born poet, critic, and publisher who settled in England in 1915; author of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, Criterion editor, Faber director, 1948 Nobel laureate.
Tess Gallagher
Tess Gallagher, born Tess Bond, is an American poet and short story writer from Port Angeles, Washington, known for eleven poetry books and her marriage to Raymond Carver.
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) was an American poet and professor whose central subject was his childhood in his father's Michigan greenhouse; "The Waking" is his best-known poem.
Vijay Seshadri
Vijay Seshadri, born in Bangalore in 1954, is an American poet who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 3 Sections, the first Asian American poet to win it.
Vivian Ayers Allen
Vivian Ayers Allen (1923-2025), American poet, playwright, classicist, and cultural activist; author of the 1957 space-flight allegory Hawk; first Black full-time faculty member at Rice University; mother of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen.
W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden (1907–1973), English-born poet and librettist of the Auden Generation, emigrated to America, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety, and pioneered modern diction in English verse.
W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin (William Stanley Merwin, 1927–2019), American poet, translator, and environmentalist; two-time Pulitzer winner (The Carrier of Ladders, The Shadow of Sirius), 2005 National Book Award for Migration, U.S. Poet Laureate 2010–2011, known for unpunctuated verse and Maui palm-forest restoration.
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an American poet and Hartford insurance executive whose first book, Harmonium (1923), became a landmark of modern poetry; he won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize.
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet of Leaves of Grass, self-published 1855 with 12 poems and revised for life through editions counted as six, seven, or nine, ending with the 1891-92 deathbed edition; free-verse innovator praised by Emerson, censored in Boston, and a Civil War-era government clerk.
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) was an American poet, novelist, essayist, and Kentucky farmer who wrote more than fifty books celebrating rural life and criticizing industrial agriculture.
Wendy Rose
Wendy Rose, born Bronwen Elizabeth Edwards in 1948, is an American poet and anthropologist of Hopi, Miwok, and European descent whose collection Lost Copper was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.