Deborah Ager

Deborah Ager is a graduate of the Newfield Network coaching school and a member of the International Coach Federation and Coachville. She earned a BA in English and a MFA in creative writing. Her coaching business is Lifespace Coaching.

She fulfilled a lifelong dream when she founded 32 Poems Magazine, a nonprofit corporation and semiannual literary magazine, that publishes Pulitzer-nominated and emerging poets.

Delmira Agustini Biography

Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1886. At a young age she began to compose and publish poems in literary journals such as "La Alborada," where she wrote a society column under the modernista pen name "Joujou." Soon she attracted the attention of Latin America's preeminent intellectuals who, however, remarked her beauty and youth over her poetry. This mechanism of textualization, that is, the conversion of the female writer into a literary object, haunted Agustini throughout her career and continued even after her tragic death.

In 1907, Delmira Agustini published her first book of poems, El libro blanco (Frágil), which was very well received by the writers and critics of the time. Three years later, Agustini published Cantos de la mañana, which concluded with a selection of reviews on her first book. In these reviews critics continued to refer to Agustini using metaphors related to virginity and inspiration, an image that Agustini herself assumed and cultivated in accordance with the modernista rhetoric and the restricted roles imposed on the women of the age.

The myth of Delmira Agustini's duplicity was born in this atmosphere. On one hand, "la Nena" (the Baby), as she was called in the private sphere, responded to the restrictive societal constructs of the era that denied sexuality to their upper-class women. On the other hand, the writer began to formulate verses that intensified a powerful, sexual imagery. It was at this point that the authors' and critics' delicate epithets changed drastically. After publishing her second and third books, critics started addressing her in terms similar to those later used by Emir Rodríguez Monegal: "pithiness in heat," "sexually obsessed", and "fevered Leda." Needless to say, this approach was never used when critics addressed male writers. Another distorting direction that literary criticism took in response to Agustini was to erase or mask the sexual content of her writings.

In 1913, Delmira Agustini married Enrique Job Reyes, a man detached from the literary arena. The event was attended by some of the best renowned intellectuals of the time such as Carlos Vaz Ferreira, Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, and Manuel Ugarte. With Ugarte, Agustini had maintained an intense epistolary romance. After only a few weeks of marriage, Delmira asked for divorce. Earlier that year, Agustini had published her third poetic work, Los cálices vacíos, where she announces a new book to be publish under the title "Los astros del abismo." She never accomplished what she considered her most mature work because in July of 1914, Enrique Job Reyes killed her in one of their clandestine encounters. Ten years later Delmira Agustini's Complete Works were printed, which included a selection of her unpublished material under the name of "El rosario de Eros."

Modern research on Agustini has given special attention to Agustini's biography, frequently exploring the idiosyncrasy of the author's family, which certainly facilitated her publishing. Critics have often speculated on the dominant and protective personality of Agustini's mother while the poet's puritan father transcribed her erotic verses (Machado de Benvenuto, Silva). Alejandro Cáceres (VVAA) suggests that Delmira's parents had a clear project to devote themselves to their prodigious child. Silvia Molloy comments on the deliberate infantilism that Agustini used as a protective mask. Molloy also compares Agustini's revision of the myth of Leda and the swan with the voyeuristic and misogynist version of Rubén Darío and the modernistas. Other feminist approaches include the study by Gwen Kirkpatrick, who points out the experimental and subversive character of Delmira style. Tina Escaja analyzes Agustini's poems basing her approach on the author's subversion of patriarchal myths and the inscription of female imagery.

In 1993, the most complete and rigorous compilation to date of Agustini's poetry appeared, edited and introduced by Magdalena García Pinto. This volume confirms the eminence of the poet and contributes to her recent inclusion into the literary canon in which Delmira Agustini stands out as one of the most extraordinary voices of Latin American modern literature.

Louisa May Alcott Biography

MISS ALCOTT was born at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1833.

Her father was Amos Bronson Alcott, an American educator of considerable note. The father commenced as a local trader, and carried his trunk about among the planters of Virginia. Having acquired an education from books loaned to him, he commenced teaching school. In 1828 he removed to Boston, and established a school for young children of five years of age. The school would succeed to-day, but then it was in advance of the age, and it failed. Finally his ability attracted attention abroad, and James P. Greaves, of London, a fellow-laborer of Pestalozzi, the immortal educator of Switzerland, invited him to come to England. Before Alcott's arrival, however, Mr. Greaves died, but he was received very cordially by the friends of the new departure in education. In honor of the American educator, their school at Ham, near London, was named the "Alcott House." Returning to America he was active in conversational and literary pursuits. He published two books, "Tablets," 1868, and "Concord Days," 1872.

Thus we see that Miss Alcott comes from a thoughtful, industrious parent. She is also a cousin of the eminent educator and author, Dr. Wm. A. Alcott, who died in Massachusetts, in 1859. Dr. Alcott visited about 20,000 schools to assist in revising and improving the school work. He published upwards of one hundred books and pamphlets on literary and educational topics. His name is identified permanently with some of the most valuable reforms in education, morals, and physical training, which the present century has witnessed. The labor performed by him without asking for compensation is almost unparalleled.

From such parentage, and guided by such relatives, it is not surprising that Miss Louisa May Alcott performed her life-work most satisfactorily. She commenced writing fairy tales in her teens. In 1855, her first volume, "Flower Fables," appeared. Her next literary work consisted of stories written for the Boston journals. "Hospital Sketches," published in 1863, won for her a general reputation. These sketches were written in the South, while she was acting in the capacity of volunteer nurse in the army. From 1863 to 1864 she wrote for the "Atlantic Monthly;" and in 1865 appeared "Moods," her first novel. "Little Women," perhaps her most popular work, was published in 1867. She published "An Old Fashioned Girl" in 1869, and "Little Men" in 1871. She has also published "Work," "Morning Glories," etc.

Miss Alcott's death occurred March 6, 1888, the day upon which her father was buried, and it is noticed as a curious coincidence that she was born upon his 24th birthday. There had always been a marked sympathy between them, and his death was so severe a blow that she sunk into a state of nervous prostration from which she could not rally.

Dante Alighieri Biography

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is generally considered the greatest of Italian poets, and also one of the greatest poets that Western civilization has produced. His reputation is primarily based upon his magnum opus The Divine Comedy. He was active in politics during the early part of his life and took an active interest in church reform.

Dante was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. Heir of a poor but noble family, he was one of the seven elected officials in charge of the government of Florence. Civil war was common in Florence at the time and the issues were further complicated by the question of Papal influence. In 1300, Dante along with his fellow magistrates confirmed anti-papal measures. When in 1302, the French prince acting under orders from the Pope captured power in Florence, Dante was sentenced on charges of corruption and opposition to the Church and exiled from Florence on pain of execution by burning if he ever returned.. He spent the rest of his life in exile, pining for his native city. He withdrew from active politics to a large extent and concentrated on his literary creations.

His first book was the Vita Nuova (The New Life), published in 1294, in which he relates how he fell in love with a young girl Beatrice. Though Beatrice and Dante both married other people, Dante's spiritual love for her persists and she functions as his chief Muse and inspiration.. In 1304 or shortly thereafter he published De Vulgari Eloquentia, an argument for writing poems and other works in the language that people speak (in his case, Italian) rather than in Latin. At the same time he wrote Il Convivio . (The Banquet), in which he discusses grammar, and styles of poetry. In 1313 he published De Monarchia (On Monarchy) in which he argued that the authority of a secular prince is not derived from the authority of the church, and is not given him by the pope, but comes directly from God.

We do not know exactly when Dante began work on Divina Commedia.He had been moving about from court to court after his exile and 1n 1317 had settled at Ravenna, where he completed his great work. Extant correspondence shows that the first and second parts of The Divine Comedy, the "Inferno" and the "Purgatario" were generally known around 1319. The last part, the "Paradiso" was completed only in 1321. Dante died at Ravenna on 14 September 1321 and the last thirteen Cantos of the "Paradiso" were published posthumously.

The plot of The Divine Comedy is straightforward. It begins with Dante lost and walking in a Dark Wood. The poet Virgil then appears as his Guide, sent by the Lady Beatrice to take him through the depths of Hell and up the slopes of Purgatory, to meet her in the country of the Blessed. Dante then follows Virgil, who conducts him through the circles of Hell, where various kinds of evil deeds are punished. They find a small tunnel or pathway cut through the rock that leads them finally out on the other side of the earth, directly opposite Jerusalem, at the foot of Mount Purgatory, which is surrounded by cornices on which the seven basic kinds of inclination to sin are purged and corrected. They climb the mount and at its summit they find the earthly Paradise, the Eden from which our first parents were expelled. There Beatrice meets Dante, and she conducts him upward through the planetary spheres. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the stars, and beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given a vision of the glory of God Himself. The poem is an allegory of human life and literally sums up the intellectual and theological knowledge of the Middle Ages.

Jane Austen Biography

Jane Austen was born December 16th, 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, England (near Basingstoke). She was the seventh child (out of eight) and the second daughter of the Rev. George Austen, 1731-1805 (the local rector, or Church of England clergyman), and his wife Cassandra, 1739-1827

In 1783, Jane and her older sister Cassandra went briefly to be taught by a Mrs. Cawley (the sister of one of their uncles), who lived first in Oxford and then moved to Southampton. They were brought home after an infectious disease broke out in Southampton. In 1785-1786 Jane and Cassandra went to the Abbey boarding school in Reading, which apparently bore some resemblance to Mrs. Goddard's casual school in Emma. (Jane was considered almost too young to benefit from the school, but their mother is reported to have said that "if Cassandra's head had been going to be cut off, Jane would have hers cut off too".) This was Jane Austen's only education outside her family. Within their family, the two girls learned drawing, to play the piano, etc.

Jane Austen did a fair amount of reading, of both the serious and the popular literature of the day (her father had a library of 500 books by 1801, and she wrote that she and her family were "great novel readers, and not ashamed of being so"). However decorous she later chose to be in her own novels, she was very familiar with eighteenth century novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson, which were much less inhibited than those of the later (near-)Victorian era. She frequently reread Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, and also enjoyed the novels of Fanny Burney (a.k.a. Madame D'Arblay). She later got the title for Pride and Prejudice from a phrase in Burney's Cecilia, and when Burney's Camilla came out in 1796, one of the subscribers was "Miss J. Austen, Steventon". The three novels that she praised in her famous "Defense of the Novel" in Northanger Abbey were Burney's Cecilia and Camilla, and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. (See also the diagram of Jane Austen's literary influences).

Jane Austen wrote her Juvenilia from 1787 to 1793; they include many humorous parodies of the literature of the day, such as Love and Freindship, and are collected in three manuscript volumes. They were originally written for the amusement of her family, and most of the pieces are dedicated to one or another of her relatives or family friends.

Earlier versions of the novels eventually published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey were all begun and worked on from 1795 to 1799 (at this early period, their working titles were Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions, and Susan respectively). Lady Susan was also probably written during this period. In 1797, First Impressions/Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher by Jane Austen's father, but the publisher declined to even look at the manuscript.

; Jane Austen would have been 27 (the age of Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion) during 1802-1803, and a crucial scene in Persuasion takes place in Lyme.

A more clearly-known incident occurred on December 2nd. 1802, when Jane Austen and Cassandra were staying with the Bigg family at Manydown, near Steventon. Harris Bigg-Wither, who was six years younger than herself, proposed to Jane, and she accepted, though she did not love him (see "Marriage and the Alternatives"). However, the next day she thought better of it, and she and Cassandra showed up unexpectedly at Steventon (where their brother James was now the clergyman), insisting they be taken out of the neighbourhood to Bath the next day. This was socially embarrassing, but her heart does not seem to have been seriously affected -- Mr. Bigg-Withers, though prosperous, was "big and awkward".

Notoriously, none of Jane Austen's letters to Cassandra from June 1801 to August 1804, in which she probably would have alluded to these incidents, have been preserved. In the end, Jane Austen (like Cassandra), never married.

In 1803 Jane Austen actually sold Northanger Abbey (then titled Susan) to a publisher, for the far-from-magnificent sum of £10; however, the publisher chose not to publish it (and it did not actually appear in print until fourteen years later). It was probably toward the end of the Bath years that Jane Austen began The Watsons, but this novel was abandoned in fragmentary form.

In January 1805 her father died. As would have been the case for the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice if Mr. Bennet had died, the income due to the remaining family (Mrs. Austen and her two daughters, the only children still at home) was considerably reduced -- since most of Mr. Austen's income had come from clerical "livings" which lapsed with his death. So they were largely dependent on support from the Austen brothers (and a relatively small amount of money left to Cassandra by her fiancé), summing to a total of about £450 yearly. Later in 1805, Martha Lloyd (sister of James Austen's wife) came to live with Mrs. Austen, Cassandra, and Jane, after her own mother had died.

In addition to her literary work, she often visited her brothers and their families, and other relatives and friends, and they sometimes came to Southampton or Chawton. She had a reputation for being able to keep young children entertained, and was also attached to her oldest nieces Fanny and Anna. In a letter of October 7th 1808, she wrote about her niece Fanny: "I found her... just what you describe, almost another Sister, -- & could not have supposed that a neice would ever have been so much to me". In a letter of October 30th 1815 she wrote to her young niece Caroline, after her sister Anna's first child had been born: "Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence & must excite great interest whatever you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, & I am sure of your doing the same now."

On April 27th she made her will (leaving almost everything to Cassandra), and on May 24 she was moved to Winchester for medical treatment. She died there on Friday, July 18th 1817, aged 41. It was not known then what had caused her death, but it seems likely that it was Addison's disease.









Download: www.eType1.com/e3.php?E05RoR

A. R. Ammons

Ammons was born near Whiteville, N.C., in 1926 and graduated from Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where he received a bachelor's degree in biology. He began writing poetry while serving onboard a U.S. Naval destroyer during World War II. Before coming to Cornell in 1964, he attended graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley, worked as an elementary school principal in Cape Hatteras, N.C., as a real estate salesman, an editor and as a sales executive at his father-in-law's New Jersey glass company. His first book of poetry was published in 1955.

The citation for Ammons' 1973 National Book Award reads in part: "In the enormous range of his work, from the briefest confrontations with the visual to long powerful visionary poems, he has extended into our present and our future the great American tradition of which Emerson and Whitman were founders."

Roald Hoffmann, a 1981 Nobel laureate in chemistry as well as a poet and Ammons' colleague at Cornell, described his friend as a "natural philosopher" in an address he gave during Cornell's "Ammonsfest" -- a celebration of Ammons' life and work held on campus in 1998. "His search, gentle yet insistent, is for a philosophy of nature -- a metaphysics always, an epistemology of openness to the connectedness of things and ideas, its inherent logic, an aesthetics rooted in the wonder of it all and reinforced by the purposive harmony of his poems, an ethics, even an eschatology of the very real world."

Fellow North Carolinian, Robert Morgan, novelist, poet and Cornell Kappa Alpha Professor of English, spoke of faculty member Ammons' willingness "to take the unpopular point of view in a discussion, to be advocate for the truly disadvantaged, the outsider. He was always able to surprise us. He was a presence, a leader."

Of Ammons' poetry, Morgan said, "Though he was famous for the fine abstraction of his poetry, he was also capable of vivid and significant detail. The high abstraction of his thought was wedded to an immediate idiom, a living voice. He was one of the most distinctive voices in American poetry. There is no one like him."

Phyllis Janowitz, Cornell professor of English, spoke of her long friendship with Ammons saying, "He was the most generous man and friend anyone could know or have; he made everyone feel like the only one."

Roger Gilbert, Cornell professor of English, appeared with Ammons at the Women's Community Building in downtown Ithaca for a reading last spring -- Ammons' last public appearance as it turned out. Gilbert, who has included Ammons' works in one of his own poetry anthologies, said it was a phone call from Ammons that convinced him to come to Cornell.

"Cornell had made me a job offer, and I was procrastinating to see what else would come along. One day the phone rang and it was Archie, as friendly and relaxed as he always was, saying nice things about my work and hoping that I'd come to Cornell," said Gilbert. "That call meant more to me than any material enticement could have, because it told me that if I went to Cornell, I'd have a genuine relationship with one of the poets I most admired, despite the huge differences in our ages and reputations. And that turned out to be true."

Ammons was a marvelous conversationalist who held weekly informal discussions in the Goldwin Smith Hall's Temple of Zeus coffee shop. Jonathan Culler, senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and former English department chair, remembered Ammons as a "gentleman and a colleague interested in the work of others, even literary theorists whose concerns must have seemed remote from his own. He spent a lot of time around the department and was always available for a chat in the mailroom or over coffee in the Temple of Zeus," Culler said.

Gilbert said he'll miss those informal talks.

"For a poet as prolific as Archie, he was amazingly gregarious, often sitting in his office with the door open just waiting for visitors to drop by for a chat," Gilbert said. "Many mornings as I'd pass through Zeus to get my coffee, I'd decline Archie's invitations to sit and schmooze for a few minutes, explaining that I had to go prepare my class (which I did). I'd give anything to go back and have those missed conversations now."

Former Cornell provost Don Randel, now president of the University of Chicago, was an admirer of Ammons' work. Reflecting on his friend's passing Monday, Randel said:

"Archie Ammons once began a poem saying, 'Nothing's going to become of anyone except death.' He was right, as usual, and right in the same poem to urge us in the face of this fact to 'drill imagination right through necessity.' But in that opening line, he was in an important way also wrong about himself. For what has become of Archie is also that he has given many of us the words with which we will continue to think about nature, art, death, life and a good deal else. By this method he will outlive us all."

Ammons is survived by his wife, Phyllis Ammons, of Ithaca, his sister, Vida Cox, of North Carolina, son John Ammons and daughter-in-law Wendy Moscow, and two grandchildren, Matthew and Jasmine, all of California. Plans for services are incomplete at this time.

John Ashbery Biography

John Lawrence Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28th 1927, the first son of Chester Frederick (a farmer) and Helen Ashbery (a biology teacher). He went to school in Rochester and in his home town of Sodus, and at the age of sixteen was sent as a boarder to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. After graduating from there, in 1945, he entered Harvard University, where he studied English.

Ashbery had been writing poetry since his schooldays, and while at Deerfield had even had two of his poems published in the prestigious magazine, Poetry. Two years after he went to college he submitted work to the Harvard Advocate, the recently revived undergraduate magazine, whose editors were Robert Bly, Donald Hall and Kenneth Koch. The poems were quickly published, and just a few months later their author found himself installed as the fourth member of the magazine's editorial board. According to Hall, he quickly became the Advocate's leading light.

Ashbery obtained his BA in 1949, and went to Columbia University to study for his MA. He graduated from there in 1951, and found work in publishing, becoming a copywriter, first for Oxford University Press and then for McGraw Hill Book Company. Poems of his continued to appear in magazines, amongst them Furioso, Poetry New York and Partisan Review, but as well as pursuing his literary interests, Ashbery was now mixing in New York's artistic circles, frequenting the galleries, and getting to know the painters. Then, in 1953, thanks to its director, John Myers, the city's influential Tibor de Nagy Gallery published a slender chapbook of Ashbery's poems, complete with illustrations by the artist Jane Freilicher. Turandot and Other Poems seems not to have attracted much notice, but Alfred Corn subsequently included its publication in a list of the most important events 'in the history of twentieth century avant-garde art'.

Home
What's New
Catalogue
Personnel
How to Order
How to Contact us
Site Map

John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford

Order the book online

Three years later, by which time he was in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship, Ashbery's first full collection was chosen by W.H. Auden for inclusion in Yale University Press's Younger Poets Series. Reviewing Some Trees for Poetry, Frank O'Hara wrote of Ashbery's 'faultless music' and 'originality of perception', and pronounced it 'the most beautiful first book to appear in America since Harmonium'. Not everyone felt so enthusiastic, however. William Arrowsmith, writing for the Hudson Review, declared that he had 'no idea most of the time what Mr Ashbery is talking about ... beyond the communication of an intolerable vagueness that looks as if it was meant for precision,' and added, for good measure: 'What does come through is an impression of an impossibly fractured brittle world, depersonalized and discontinuous, whose characteristic emotional gesture is an effete and cerebral whimsy.'

Ashbery's period as a Fulbright fellow came to an end in 1957, but life in Paris had been so much to his liking that, after another year in the US - a year in which he took graduate classes at New York University and worked as an instructor in elementary French - he returned, avowedly to pursue research for a doctoral dissertation on the writer Raymond Roussel. He was to remain in France for several years, supporting himself by writing for a number of different journals. He had started to review for the magazine ArtNews during his year in New York, and continued with this once back in Paris. Then, in 1960, he became art critic for the New York Herald Tribune (international edition), and, in 1961, art critic for Art International as well. Nor were these his only such commitments. In the same year that he started writing for the New York Herald Tribune, he joined with Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler and founded the literary magazine, Locus Solus. That folded in 1962, but the following year he got together with Anne Dunn, Rodrigo Moynihan and Sonia Orwell, and founded Art and Literature, a quarterly review he worked on until he went back to living in the US, in 1966.

When not writing reviews, or engaged in editorial work, Ashbery still found time to write poetry. It was poetry of a very different kind to that he had published in Some Trees, however, and readers familiar with the first book will have been altogether unprepared for the 'violently experimental' character of the second (unless they had been keeping an eye on Big Table and Locus Solus, the magazines in which some of these poems first appeared). Reactions to The Tennis Court Oath were generally hostile. James Schevill told readers of the Saturday Review: 'The trouble with Ashbery's work is that he is influenced by modern painting to the point where he tries to apply words to the page as if they were abstract, emotional colors and shapes ... Consequently, his work loses coherence ... There is little substance to the poems in this book.' And Mona Van Duyn told readers of Poetry: 'If a state of continuous exasperation, a continuous frustration of expectation, a continuous titillation of the imagination are sufficient response to a series of thirty-one poems, then these have been successful. But to be satisfied with such a response I must change my notion of poetry. Even so devoted an admirer of Ashbery as Harold Bloom thought the book a 'fearful disaster' and confessed to being baffled at how its author could have 'collapse[d] into such a bog' just six years after Some Trees.

Ashbery has said that when he was working on the poems that went into The Tennis Court Oath he was 'taking language apart so I could look at the pieces that made it up', and that after he'd done this he was intent on 'putting [the pieces] back together again'. Rivers and Mountains, published in the year that he settled back in the US, was the first of his books to follow, and marked what several of his critics regard as his real arrival as a poet, with poems such as "These Lacustrine Cities", "Clepsydra" and "The Skaters" all demonstrating for the first time what one of them has called the 'astonishing range and flexibility of Ashbery's voice'. The volume was nominated for the National Book Award.

Ashbery had gone back to the US after being offered the job of executive editor of ArtNews. Four years later, in 1969, the Black Sparrow Press published his long poem "Fragment", with illustrations by the painter Alex Katz. Writing about this seven years on, Bloom declared that it was, for him, Ashbery's 'finest work'. By then, it should be noted, the poem had plenty of rivals, since The Double Dream of Spring (which included "Fragment") had appeared in 1970, Three Poems had appeared in 1972, and The Vermont Notebook and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror had appeared in 1975. All of these books had won Ashbery admiring notices, and Three Poems had also secured him the Modern Poetry Association's Frank O'Hara Prize, but it was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror that proved to be the breakthrough, carrying off all three of America's most important literary prizes - the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. John Malcolm Brinnin's notice for the New York Times Book Review can be taken as representative: '[A] collection of poems of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet has even begun to explore ...'

ArtNews was sold in 1972, and Ashbery had to find himself another job. A Guggenheim Fellowship sustained him for some months, but then, in 1974, he took up the offer of a teaching post at Brooklyn College - a part of the City University of New York - where he co-directed the MFA program in creative writing. Though he has confessed to not liking teaching very much, he has been doing it ever since, though with one prolonged break between 1985 and 1990, made possible by the award of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. He left Brooklyn College in 1990, was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard between 1989 and 1990, and from then until now has been Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College at Annandale-on Hudson, New York.

Just as Ashbery's art reviewing and editorial work seemed not to affect his creative output during the Sixties and early Seventies, so his teaching work seems not to have affected it during the decades since. In fact, he has been remarkably prolific, averaging a new collection once every eighteen months. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was followed by: Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987), Flow Chart (1991), Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), Girls on the Run (1999), Your Name Here (2000), As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001) and Chinese Whispers (2002) (to mention only his book-length collections). He has also published Three Plays (1978), Reported Sightings (a selection of his art reviews) (1989) and Other Traditions (revised versions of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1989 and 1990).

This large body of work has won Ashbery numerous admirers, amongst them some of today's most prominent critics. It has also won him numerous honours, awards and prizes, a partial list of which would include (apart from those already mentioned) two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants (1962, 1972), Poetry magazine's Harriet Monroe Poetry Award (1963) and Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Prize (1966), two Guggenheim fellowships (1967, 1973), two National Endowment for the Arts publication awards (1969, 1970), the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (1973), Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize (1977), a National Endowment for the Arts Composer/Librettist grant (with Elliott Carter) (1978), a Rockefeller Foundation grant for playwriting (1979-1980), the English Speaking Union Award (1979), membership of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980), fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (1982), the New York City Mayor's Award of Honour for Arts and Culture, Bard College's Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Art and Letters, membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983), American Poetry Review's Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Award (1983, 1995), Nation magazine's Lenore Marshall Award, the Bollingen Prize, Timothy Dwight College/Yale University's Wallace Stevens fellowship (1985), the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature (1986), the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award (1987), Chancellorship of the Academy of American Poets (1988-1989), Brandeis University's Creative Arts Award in Poetry (Medal) (1989), the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Munich)'s Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry (1991), Poetry magazine's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome)'s Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry (1992), the French Ministry of Education and Culture (Paris)'s Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (1993), the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal (1995), the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), the Silver Medal of the City of Paris (1996), the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Gold Medal for Poetry (1997), Boston Review of Books's Bingham Poetry Prize (1998), the State of New York/New York State Writers Institute's Walt Whitman Citation of Merit (2000), Columbia County (New York) Council on the Arts Special Citation for Literature, the Academy of American Poets's Wallace Stevens Award, Harvard University's Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts (2001), the New York State Poet Laureateship (2001-2002), the Officier, Légion d'Honneur of the Republic of France (2002).

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family in Odessa, the Ukraine, in 1889. Her interest in poetry began in her youth, but when her father found out about her aspirations, he told her not to shame the family name by becoming a "decadent poetess". He forced her to take a pen name, and she chose the last name of her maternal great-grandmother. She attended law school in Kiev and married Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and critic, in 1910. Shortly after the marriage, he travelled to Abyssinia, leaving her behind. While Gumilev was away, Akhmatova wrote many of the poems that would be published in her popular first book, Evening. Her son Lev was also born in 1912. He was raised by his paternal grandmother, who disliked Akhmatova. Akhmatova protested this situation, but her husband supported his family. She would visit with her son during holidays and summer. Later, Akhmatova would write that "motherhood is a bright torture. I was not worthy of it."

Upon Evening's publication in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure among the intelligentsia and part of the literary scene in St. Petersburg. Her second book, Rosary (1914), was critically acclaimed and established her reputation. With her husband, she became a leader of Acmeism, a movement which praised the virtues of lucid, carefully-crafted verse and reacted against the vagueness of the Symbolist style which dominated the Russian literary scene of the period. She and Gumilev divorced in 1918. Akhmatova married twice more, to Vladimir Shileiko in 1918, whom she divorced in 1928, and Nikolai Punin, who died in a Siberian labor camp in 1953. The writer Boris Pasternak, who was already married, had proposed to her numerous times.

Nikolai Gumilev was executed in 1921 by the Bolsheviks, and, although Akhmatova and he were divorced, she was still associated with him. As a result, after her book Anno Domini MCMXXI was published in 1922, she had great difficulty finding a publisher. There was an unofficial ban on Akhmatova's poetry from 1925 until 1940. During this time, Akhmatova devoted herself to literary criticism, particularly of Pushkin, and translations. During the latter part of the 1930s, she composed a long poem, Requiem, dedicated to the memory of Stalin's victims. In 1940, a collection of previously published poems, From Six Books, was published. A few months later it was withdrawn.

Changes in the political climate finally allowed her acceptance into the Writer's Union, but following World War II, there was an official decree banning publication of her poetry and Andrey Zhadanov, the Secretary of the Central Committee, expelled her from the Writer's Union, calling her "half nun, half harlot". Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1949 and held in jail until 1956. To try to win his release, Akhmatova wrote poems in praise of Stalin and the government, but it was of no use. Later she requested that these poems not appear in her collected works. She began writing and publishing again in 1958, but with heavy censorship. Young poets like Joseph Brodsky flocked to her. To them, she represented a link with the pre-Revolutionary past which had been destroyed by the Communists.

Though Akhmatova was frequently confronted with official government opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and lauded by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works, Requiem (which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987) and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist Terror, during which time she endured artistic repression as well as tremendous personal loss.

Akhmatova also translated the works of Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets, and she wrote memoirs of Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the artist Amedeo Modigliani, and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelstam. In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honors were her first travels outside Russia since 1912. Two years before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966.

Yehuda Amichai Biography

Yehuda Amichai is one of the leading contemporary Hebrew poets. His contribution extends beyond his own literary achievements to an influence that helped create a modern Israeli poetry .

Born in Germany to a religiously observant family, Amichai and his family emigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1935, living briefly in Petach Tikvah before settling in Jerusalem. In World War II he fought with the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, and upon his discharge in 1946, he joined the Palmach. During the War of Independence he fought in the Negev, on the southern front. Following the war, Amichai attended Hebrew University, studying Biblical texts and Hebrew literature, and then taught in secondary schools.

Amichai's first volume of poetry, Achshav Uve-Yamim HaAharim (“Now and in Other Days”) was published in 1955 and aroused serious interest in readers and critics alike. This and subsequent volumes of poetry revealed that Amichai was engaged in a distinctly modern literary enterprise, both in content and in language. Subjects heretofore deemed prosaic became appropriate poetic images: tanks, airplanes, fuel, administrative contracts, and technological terms figure in his work, reflecting Amichai's conviction that a modern poetry must confront and reflect contemporary issues.

Concomitant with his non-traditional choice of subjects is Amichai's innovative use of the Hebrew language. Drawing from and interfacing various strata of language, from classical Hebrew to the post-modern colloquial, Amichai became known as the “poet who plays with words.” Influenced by the wit and irony of modern English poetry, Amichai, also a master of understatement, coined new idioms and slang expressions, and incorporated prose phrases in his work. As with his imagery and subject matter, his linguistic versatility reflects his sense that language, including poetic language, emerges out of the modern technological society rather than classical texts only. Hence the citation of the Israel Prize, awarded to Amichai in 1982, which heralded “the revolutionary change in poetry's language” that the poet had begun through his work.

Amichai's poetry spans a range of emotions, from laughter to sadness to self-mockery. His work emphasizes the individual who, although conscious and integrally part of the collective experience, ultimately views the world through his personal lens. This individual perspective evinces a candid, honest approach to the outside world.

Amichai's canon is also impressive for the volume of work it encompasses, and many individual books of poetry appeared in rapid succession, as well as Collected Poems (1963) and Selected Works of 1981. Shirei Yerushalayim (“Poems of Jerusalem,” 1987) is a bilingual edition accompanied by photographs of the city, a model Amichai used again in 1992 for other poems, scenes, and photos. In addition to his numerous volumes of poetry, he has written short stories, two novels, radio sketches, and children's literature. Much of his work has been translated into other languages.

Matthew Arnold Biography

Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics. After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold's reputation as a poet and in 1857 he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.

Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In "To Marguerite—Continued," for example, Arnold revises Donne's assertion that "No man is an island," suggesting that we "mortals" are indeed "in the sea of life enisled." Other well-known poems, such as "Dover Beach," link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In "The Function of Criticism" (1865) and "The Study of Poetry" (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, "to animate and ennoble them." Arnold's arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet's most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds. Late in life, in 1883 and 1886, Arnold made two lecturing tours of the United States. Matthew Arnold died in Liverpool in 1888.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. She is the daughter of a forest entomologist, and spent part of her early years in the bush of North Quebec. She moved, at the age of seven, to Toronto. She studied at the University of Toronto, then took her masters degree at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, in 1962.

She is Canada's most eminent novelist and poet, and also writes short stories, critical studies, screenplays, radio scripts and books for children, her works having been translated into over 30 languages. Her reviews and critical articles have appeared in various eminent magazines and she has also edited many books, including The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1983) and, with Robert Weaver, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986). She has been a full-time writer since 1972, first teaching English, then holding a variety of academic posts and writer residencies. She was President of the Writers Union of Canada from 1981-1982 and President of PEN, Canada from 1984-1986.

Her first publication was a book of poetry, The Circle Game (1964), which received the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry (Canada). Several more poetry collections have followed since, including Interlunar (1988), Morning in the Burned House (1995) and the latest, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965-1995 (1998). Also a short story writer, her books of short fiction include Dancing Girls and Other Stories (1982), Wilderness Tips (1991), and Good Bones (1992).

She is perhaps best known, however, for her novels, in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. Her first novel was The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who cannot eat and feels that she is being eaten. This was followed by: Surfacing (1973), which deals with a woman's investigation into her father's disappearance; Lady Oracle (1977); Life Before Man (1980); Bodily Harm (1982), the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist recuperating on a Caribbean island; and The Handmaid's Tale (1986), a futuristic novel describing a woman's struggle to break free from her role. Her latest novels have been: Cat's Eye (1989), dealing with the subject of bullying among young girls; The Robber Bride (1993); Alias Grace (1996), the tale of a woman who is convicted for her involvement in two murders about which she claims to have no memory; The Blind Assassin (2000), a multi-layered family memoir; and Oryx and Crake (2003), a vision of a scientific dystopia, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.

These novels have received many awards. Alias Grace, The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye have all been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Blind Assassin was successful in winning this prize in 2000.

Some of Margaret Atwood's books have been adapted for stage and screen. A film based on Alias Grace is currently being made, and a four-part mini-seres based on The Blind Assassin and screenplay for The Robber Bride are also underway. The theatrical version of The Edible Woman is currently also being successfully staged. The Handmaid's Tale was adapted for screen by Harold Pinter in a film directed by Volker Schlorndorf, released in 1990, and is now being staged as an opera by Poul Ruders. The British Premiere was performed by English National Opera at the Coliseum, London, in April 2003.

Margaret Atwood is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has been presented with the Order of Ontario and the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, and has been awarded sixteen honorary degrees. She has lived in many places including Canada, England, Scotland and France, and currently lives in Toronto.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. She is an author, poet, historian, songwriter, playwright, dancer, stage and screen producer, director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist. She is best known for her autobiographical books: All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), The Heart of a Woman (1981), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), Gather Together in My Name (1974), and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award. Among her volumes of poetry are A Brave and Startling Truth (Random House, 1995), The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994), Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer prize.

In 1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the U.S. in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1981 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, "On The Pulse of the Morning," at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request.

The first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou has written, produced, directed, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries "Three Way Choice." She has also written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Maya Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots (1977).