Poets are listed here in order of appearance.
SAPPHO was born in the late-seventh century BCE on the Greek island of Lesbos (from which we derive lesbian because of Sappho’s fame). Only one of her poems exists in its entirety; the rest only survives in fragments. She is best known for her passionate lyrics and for the cult that grew around her. She is said to have drowned, leaping from the cliffs of Leucas, despondent over an unrequited love.
ANAKREON was born circa 570 BCE in the Ionian city of Teos. His poems survive mostly in quotations from subsequent poets in the Greek Anthology, many of whom imitated his style without capturing his incisive, self-deprecatory humor.
ASKLEPIADOS was born circa 320 BCE on the island of Samos. One of the earliest and best of the epigrammists, he revived meters unused since Sappho.
PRAXILLA’S few extant poems and fragments are found in the Greek Anthology.
RUFINUS’S dates are uncertain, like several of the poets in the Greek Anthology. His work survives in only a handful of lyric poems and fragments.
MARCUS ARGENTARIUS lived in the first century BCE.
GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS was born in Verona circa 84 BCE and died by the age of thirty. He is said to have modeled the “Lesbia” in his poems on the wife of a northern Italian governor. He both translated and stole from Sappho. One hundred and sixteen of his poems survive, famous for their passionate love and invective: odi et amo, “I hate and I love.”
PHILODEMOS lived in Naples circa 75–35 BCE and was a popular and influential teacher of Epicurean philosophy.
OVID, whose full name was Publius Ovidius Naso, was born in an Apennine valley east of Rome in March 43 BCE. Augustus banished him in 8 CE and his books were removed from libraries, perhaps the result of Ovid’s having published the great Art of Love and seducing the emperor’s granddaughter. Before his death, he wrote about his ten years in exile.
PETRONIUS ARBITER (d. 66 CE) is the author of the Satyricon, a great satirist, and a member of Nero’s inner circle.
TZU YEH may have been a “wineshop girl” in the fourth century CE, or she may have been a persona developed by several young women poets.
AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS was a Greek poet, historian, and lawyer (ca. 531–580) who lived in Constantinople. About a hundred of his poems are found in the Greek Anthology.
COMETAS CHARTULARIUS is known only by a handful of poems in the Greek Anthology. He is thought to have lived in the sixth century.
PAULUS SILENTIARIUS (d. ca. 575) was an epigrammist and an officer in the imperial household of the emperor Justinian.
LI PO (701–762), China’s most famous poet, was imprisoned as a traitor, pardoned, exiled, celebrated, granted amnesty, and lived as a kind of knight-errant and miscreant. He wrote Taoist and Buddhist poems, panhandled, bragged, and drank himself to death. But his genius is undeniable. He was the most imaginative and original poet of the T’ang dynasty.
OTOMO NO YAKAMOCHI (718–785) was a major poet in the Man’yoshu, the first imperial poetry anthology of Japan, as well as one of its primary editors. He was Commanding General of the Eastern Armies and a great love poet.
YUAN CHEN (779–831) was a great and controversial poet banished for his humanistic philosophy and his refusal to remain silent about gross injustices. His life is told in The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Yuan-dynasty drama.
LI HO (791–817) was labeled a mystical poet because of his many allusions to shamanistic practices. His poor health and radical political observations kept him from high office and probably saved him from exile.
ARIWARA NO NARIHIRA (825–880) was the fifth son of Prince Abo, who was the son of Emperor Heizei and Princess Ito. Handsome and self-indulgent, he is one of the “six poetic geniuses” of Japan and figures prominently in the classic Tales of Ise.
LI HSUN’S ancestry leads back to the Persians, but despite being less than “purely” Chinese, he achieved great influence at the court of the then-independent state of Shu in tenth century Szechwan.
ONO NO KOMACHI (fl. ninth century) is the only female member of the “six poetic geniuses.” Little is known of her biography, but several Noh dramas are based upon legends of her life.
IZUMI SHIKIBU (970–1030) was the daughter of a feudal lord and was sent to the Heian court to serve a former empress. Her famous diary chronicles life at court and her many loves, including at least two princes. Lady Murasaki records her animosity toward Izumi Shikibu in Tale of Genji.
LIU YUNG (987–1053) was an accomplished musician and a great lyrical poet who worked as a junior secretary in a local administration in Chekiang, living in abject, resolute poverty. His poems were sung throughout regional villages.
SAMUEL HA-NAGID (993–1056) was vizier to the King of Granada and, for eighteen years, commander of his armies. Ha-Nagid is known in Arabic as Ismai’il ibn Nagrela. Some say it was the influence of the more accepting attitude toward homosexuality in Arabic cultures that allowed ha-Nagid, who was Jewish, to write openly of his homosexual love.
OU-YANG HSIU (1007–1072) lost his father at four and grew up in extreme poverty. He became a quintessential Chinese statesman-scholar-poet and a patron of several very important younger poets, including Su Tung-p’o. He was the most revered love poet in all of China.
SU TUNG-P’O (1037–1101), also known as Su Shih, was deeply schooled in Taoism before becoming devoted to the study of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. He suffered political defeats and banishments to become one of the great poets of the Chinese Buddhist tradition.
LI CH’ING-CHAO (1084–1151) is often called the Empress of Song. She was one of the most brilliant and innovative poets of the Sung dynasty. After the early death of her husband, she eventually remarried, but her new husband proved abusive, so she risked everything and left him. Her courage, her sharp-tongued literary criticism, and her passionate poems portray a remarkably “liberated” woman for her time. Many Chinese think of her as the first feminist in Chinese history.
MAHADEVIYAKKA (twelfth century) left her arranged marriage to become an ecstatic devotee of Shiva.
JELALUDDIN RUMI (1207–1273) was a young professor of theology in Turkey when he encountered the wandering dervish Shamsuddin of Tabriz and was transformed into an ecstatic devotee. He was a prolific poet whose highly rhythmical verses became dances for whirling dervishes.
HSU TSAI-SSU (ca. 1300) was a Mongolian poet. Only a few poems survive.
FRANCESCO PETRARCH (1304–1374) is one of the most influential poets in all of history. He established the dominance of the ten- and eleven-syllable line in Renaissance European poetry. He is also one of the most mannered, cerebral, and difficult poets in the European tradition. He lived mostly under the patronage of wealthy Italians and died near Padua, where his house still stands.
IKKYU SOJUN (1394–1481) was a Zen master renowned for his teaching and for his frankly erotic poems and revolutionary shakuhachi music. Appointed headmaster at Japan’s huge Buddhist training center, Daitokuji, in Kyoto, he resigned after nine days, denouncing the monks for hypocrisy and inviting them to argue their differences “in the whorehouses and sake parlors” where he could be found. At seventy, he scandalized the Buddhist community by moving his lover into his quarters in the temple. His sphere of influence included the tea ceremony, Noh drama, ink painting, calligraphy, and poetry, and he founded what became known as the “Red Thread” (or erotic) school of Zen.
KABIR, a great fifteenth-century mystic, was an ecstatic devotional poet who wrote thousands of verses. His songs are in the tradition of the mahatma—or “great souls”—who sing against tyranny and oppression, preaching tolerance between Hindu and Muslim communities.
VIDYAPATI was a fifteenth-century love poet who wrote in the eastern Indian language of Maithili. His poems present Radha and Krishna as perfectly idealized lovers offering their example for all humanity.
MIRABAI (1498–1550) was an Indian princess whose devotional poems are addressed to “the Dark One,” Krishna, and are filled with erotic longing. Hers was a powerful voice against the continued oppression of women, the caste system, and lack of religious freedom. Her songs have made her a saint in Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities alike.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616) was a popular actor and playwright who was known among friends for what were called “his sugared sonnets,” published without the author’s consent. Scholars have been arguing over the correct order of his sonnet sequence since publication in 1609.
BIHARI (1595–1664) was court poet to a Rajasthani ruler. He wrote in the Braj dialect of Hindi. Satasai (“The Seven Hundred”), his best known work—a compilation of over seven hundred couplets—is often compared to the Kama Sutra. His poems explore all the aspects of love, from the purely erotic to the purely spiritual.
ROBERT HERRICK (1591–1674) was a goldsmith who received a master’s degree from Cambridge and was ordained in 1623. He was well known as one of the “Sons of Ben” (Jonson) who spent his time in London taverns talking literature. When his single volume of twelve hundred poems was published in 1647, it was met with complete silence. His poems would remain unknown until the late nineteenth century.
ANNE BRADSTREET (1612–1672) is often called the first poet in the United States, and may have been the first professional woman poet in the English language. When her first book was published in London, she was hailed as “the Tenth Muse.” She was a scholar of English, French, and classical literature and spoke out for the rights of Puritan women.
SE PRAJ (seventeenth century) was exiled from a Thai court because of his engagement with the many court women who swooned over his poems. While in exile he wrote a poem for another governor’s mistress. Upon reading the poem, the governor had him beheaded.
ANDREW MARVELL (1621–1678) apparently worked as an obscure tutor until 1657, when he was appointed Assistant to the Latin Secretary for the Commonwealth, John Milton, whom Marvell may have saved from imprisonment or execution after the Restoration. In his lifetime, Marvell was known, if at all, as a minor satirist, his “serious” poetry being published only three years after his death.
JOHN DRYDEN (1631–1700) was a playwright, translator, and essayist whom Samuel Johnson called “the father of English criticism” for his development of the clear, simple, direct prose style that remains modern to this day. He is perhaps the greatest English satirical poet.
SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ (1651–1695) was hailed in her time as “the Phoenix of Mexico, the Tenth Muse,” but her poetry was forgotten upon her death, only to be rediscovered in this century. Octavio Paz has called her “the most neglected poet in the Americas.”
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745) was born in Dublin of English parents, but fled Ireland to live in London until he returned as a chaplain to the Lord Justice in 1699. For many years he was involved with educating and caring for a young woman, Esther Johnson, whom he loved all his life but never married. Increasing deafness caused by severe inner ear disorders isolated the satirist late in his life, and then senility set in; in 1742 guardians were appointed to look after his affairs until his death.
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757–1827) lived a life of almost total obscurity. He married an illiterate girl and taught her to read and to assist in his printing and engraving, but an unhappy marriage contributed to his attacks on possessive, jealous women in much of his early writing. His single bid for public recognition, a oneman show in 1809, was an utter failure. He nevertheless spent his life following his “Divine Vision,” writing poems of ecstasy and agony protesting poverty and sexual and religious suppression, and printing his books (such as Jerusalem) in editions as small as five copies. The last ten years of his life, he gave up poetry to concentrate exclusively on his visual art. In Blake’s universe, God exists within “the Universal Man.” He declares “selfhood” the original sin. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is in many respects a response to Blake. Blake’s stature as a major poet has been recognized only since the early twentieth century.
JOHN KEATS (1795–1821) lost his father at age eight and saw his mother die of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. At fifteen he was withdrawn from school and apprenticed with a surgeon, and at twenty he was qualified to practice as an apothecary. But he immediately left medicine to devote himself to poetry “for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed.” His poetry and letters reveal a mind that is almost Taoist in its fascination with inseparable but irreconcilable opposites, melancholy found in delight, ecstasy in grief, highest love approximating death. While advocating a life of “sensation,” he also spoke for an aesthetics of detachment and for social responsibility. Like his mother and his younger brother whose last months he attended, Keats died of tuberculosis.
WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892) could find no publisher for his Leaves of Grass, so he published it himself (in 1855) and reviewed it himself under various pseudonyms. Stunned by his “barbaric yawp,” the genteel poets and critics of his age were shocked by his directness, by his rude, red-dirt American speech. He spent the rest of his life adding to and revising his one great book of poems, essentially inventing the dominant style of American poetry to this day.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821–1867) was considered a failure in his lifetime. His poetry and art criticism were ignored or attacked as depraved. When Les Fleurs du Mal was published in 1857, it was reviled, and the poet, publisher, and printer convicted on charges of obscenity and fined. He is undoubtedly the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century.
EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886) published virtually nothing in her lifetime, but left sixty little volumes of poems with her sister before she died. She did send a few poems to former pastor and essayist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether they “breathed.” Otherwise, she lived quietly and imagined vigorously in a reclusive life in Massachusetts. It would take until 1955 for her complete poems to be published. She is, with Whitman, one of the two major American poets of the nineteenth century.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1872–1906) was the son of slaves, whose father fled to Canada to escape slavery and whose mother was freed after the Civil War. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in a household where self-taught readers cherished volumes of history and poetry. His poetry draws from the blues-spiritual tradition as well as from his readings of European poetry. He became the first widely popular black poet in America.
ANTONIO MACHADO Y RUIZ (1875–1939) was born in Seville and raised in Madrid. Gaining a professorship in French, he moved to Soria, where his young wife died. For ten years he moved back and forth from Paris, finally settling in Madrid for part of each year. Perhaps because of the death of his wife, and certainly in part because of the rise of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorship and the banning of Machado’s writing, the poet is famous for his poignant sense of solitude and a somber, unadorned style.
YOSANO AKIKO (1878–1942) could be called Japan’s first feminist. A prolific writer of poetry, essays, novels, stories, fairytales, and autobiography, her first book, Tangled Hair, is a collection of tanka (five-line poems in traditional form) detailing the passions and heartaches of erotic love in a triangle. A great social conscience, she spoke out almost alone against Japanese expansionism. She remained in the forefront of the women’s rights movement all her life.
ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889–1966) was born in Odessa on the Black Sea, but her name is forever linked to Petersburg and the village of Tsarskoye Selo, where she spent the first sixteen years of her life. The best of the Russian modernist poets, she would spend much of her life in enforced silence, a victim of censorship, her friends memorizing her poems in order to save them for posterity. A stoical, reticent woman, Akhmatova is revealed only through her poems and letters.
FEDERICO GARCíA-LORCA (1898–1936) was born in Granada and was murdered by Franco’s civil guard after refusing to leave Spain. He was a major poet and dramatist, a pianist, artist, actor, and director. He drew heavily on the folklore and traditions of Anadalusia, advocating a “poetry of deep song” imbued with soulful duende, writing “verses that are very much my own, singing the same way to Christ as to Buddha, to Mohammed as to Pan.”
PABLO NERUDA (1904–1973) was a prolific poeta del pueblo, poet of the people, one of the dominant figures in twentieth-century Chilean history and recipient of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature. A dedicated political activist, he was an apologist for Stalinist Russia while remaining devoted to the ideals of democratic socialism. When he died, broken-hearted over the U.S.-inspired and -financed overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government of Allende in 1972, the new dictatorship issued an edict forbidding public acknowledgment of his funeral. Nevertheless, tens of thousands risked life and limb, pouring into the streets, chanting, “I am Pablo Neruda, I am Pablo Neruda!”
KENNETH REXROTH (1905–1982) was an autodidact, a conscientious objector during World War II, a primary figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and author of fifty-four volumes of poetry, essays, translations from a dozen languages, plays, and autobiography. A poet with an enormous spiritual hunger, he drew equally from the classics, from Jewish intellectual traditions, and from Buddhist and Christian philosophical traditions.
SA‘ID ‘AQL (b. 1912) is a Lebanese poet who is best known for bringing the influence of French Symbolism into Arabic poetry.
THOMAS MCGRATH (1916–1990) was born on a North Dakota farm and served in the Aleutian Islands during World War II before accepting a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. Blacklisted during the McCarthy Era for his socialist politics, McGrath worked as a documentary film-script writer, labor organizer, and teacher.
HAYDEN CARRUTH (b. 1921) received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Collected Shorter Poems 1946–1991. The author of dozens of volumes of poetry and essays, he has addressed the meditative, the erotic, and the poet’s responsibilities for nearly fifty years.
DENISE LEVERTOV (b. 1923) is a prolific poet whose meditative prowess is revealed alongside her profound social conscience and luminous powers of description in many volumes of poetry and essays. Born in England, she has lived in the United States since the 1950s, currently in Seattle.
CAROLYN KIZER (b. 1925) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and the former director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry and translations reveal the influence of time spent living in China and Pakistan. She has been a leading figure in feminist poetry for four decades.
ROBERT CREELEY (b. 1926), a leading figure at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, is one of the most popular and influential poets of our time.
ADRIENNE RICH (b. 1929) is the author of some of the most important poetry and essays of our time. In her poetry, which has been translated into dozens of languages, the erotic and the political, the spiritual and the physical, are mutually engaged in seamless lyrics.
ROBERTO SOSA (b. 1930) was born in Yoro, Honduras, and was raised in poverty under the dictatorship of Tiburcio Carias Andino. A teacher, journalist, and editor, he lives in Tegucigalpa, where his Obra Completa was published in 1990.
ROBERT KELLY (b. 1935) is a prolific poet, editor, and scholar formerly associated with the influential literary journals Trobar and Chelsea Review. He teaches at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
LUCILLE CLIFTON (b. 1936) has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and has received an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The author of several volumes of poetry that are among the most popular of our time, her most recent collection is The Book of Light.
JAAN KAPLINSKI (b. 1941) was born in Tartu, Estonia. His father disappeared into Stalin’s labor camps while the poet was a small child. A student of structural and mathematical linguistics and of anthropology, he has translated from Spanish, French, English, and Polish, and is a leading figure in the cultural life of newly free Estonia.
SAM HAMILL (b. 1943) is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and translations from classical Chinese and Japanese, ancient Greek, Latin, and other languages. He is founding editor of Copper Canyon Press.
GIOCONDA BELLI (b. 1948) was born in Managua, Nicaragua, and gained international attention for her feminist, erotic, and political poems during the Sandinista movement. Exiled in 1975 for her ties to the national liberation movement, she lived in Costa Rica for three years. She now lives in Managua.
OLGA BROUMAS (b. 1949) was born in Syros, Greece, has published five volumes of poetry, and translated the poetry and essays of the Greek Nobel laureate Odysseas Elytis. Renowned for its lyric intensity, her poetry is rooted in the ecstatic tradition with Sappho as its wellspring.
MAURYA SIMON (b. 1950) was born in New York City and grew up in Europe and Southern California before studying Tamil in India. Her four volumes of published poetry reflect her extensive studies in Indo-European cultures, especially early Hindu and Buddhist traditions, along with her Jewish heritage.
DORIANNE LAUX (b. 1952) was born in Augusta, Maine, and is of Irish, French, and Algonquin Indian heritage. She lived in the San Francisco Bay area for more than ten years, holding down a succession of menial jobs while perfecting her craft, earning a degree from Mills College, and raising her daughter. She teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene.