Explore Poetry
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Poem
by Ona Gritz
Poet
Derek Walcott
B. 1930 D. 2017
Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1992, two years after the publication of his most ambitious and celebrated work, Omeros, an epic poem which draws on the Homeric tradition and relocates it in the voices…
Poet
Ocean Vuong
B. 1988
Ocean Vuong’s literary output is a survival project, its high stakes evident in both its central questions – pertaining to desire, trauma, masculinity, personal and public histories, to sexuality – and in its mutable forms. ‘Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement,’ Vuong has said, ‘I see form as an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be…
Poem
The Connoisseuse of Slugs - Sharon Olds
Poem
Ode to the Hymen - Sharon Olds
Poet
Sharon Olds
B. 1942
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942. She studied at Stanford University and received her PhD from Columbia University, where she wrote a thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She has published twelve books of poems, including Satan Says (1980), The Father (1992), Stag’s Leap (2012), Odes (2016)…
Poem
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921 - Sharon Olds
Special Collection
Poet
Edgar Allan Poe
B. 1809 D. 1849
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, the son of poverty-stricken actors. His father died from consumption; soon afterwards, his English mother, who in her time had played Juliet, Ophelia and a range of Shakespearian leading roles, died and left…
Poet
Phyllis Wheatley
B. 1753 D. 1784
Phillis Wheatley was the first US slave to publish a book of poems. Born in Africa in about 1753 and shipped as an 8 year old child to the Boston Slave Market, she was purchased by John Wheatley to be…
Poet
Steve Ellis
B. 1952
Born in York in 1952, Steve Ellis has published three collections of poetry, including West Pathway (1993) and Home and Away, verse translations of Dante’s Inferno and The Divine Comedy and a number of academic monographs on writers such as Chaucer, T….
Poet
Mary Jo Salter
B. 1954
Mary Jo Salter describes herself as a ‘particularly formal poet’. Her attention to and rigorous engagement with poetic form is not only manifested across her eight books of poetry, but in her co-editorship of the Norton Anthology of Poetry in…