Bei Dao (Zhao Zhenkai)

Chinese, 1949–

“On the one hand poetry is useless. It can’t change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence.” This ambivalent statement comes from a poet whose life and work seem to suggest the very opposite. As a leading voice of China’s “lost generation” and an inspiration for the country’s democracy movement, Bei Dao has been closely and influentially engaged with the political changes that have transformed his homeland over the last half century.

Born in Beijing to a professional family, Zhao Zhenkai (who later adopted the pen name Bei Dao) ended his formal education at age seventeen when he was swept into the vortex of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He joined the Red Guard, was “reeducated” in the countryside, and for the next decade worked as a construction laborer. Amid the disillusionments of that period, he began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Bei Dao, which means “ North Island,” a nickname given to him by friends in reference to his northern birthplace and solitary manner.

Bei Dao’s poetry first made its mark during the 1970s, when he helped establish the journal Jintian (Today), the literary flagship of the young democracy movement. Breaking with orthodoxy, Bei Dao helped pioneer a style that came to be known as “misty poetry,” a free verse form employing deliberately elusive language, through which readers may glimpse flickers of subversive thought, as in these lines from his most famous poem, Hui Da (Answers):

Debasement is the password of the base
Nobility the epitaph of the noble
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting, twisted shadows of the dead

Shortly after that poem appeared in 1980, Jintian was shut down by the authorities and Bei Dao became a regular target of official criticism. When his collected poems The August Sleepwalker appeared in 1986, they garnered critical praise, but were soon banned. His poems had also begun to earn a reputation overseas, and despite tension with the authorities, he was able to travel abroad regularly for readings and lectures. He was in Germany in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square massacre, where student demonstrators reportedly circulated his works, even emblazoning lines from one poem on a banner: “I will not kneel on the ground/Allowing the executioner to look tall.”

Since the massacre, Bei Dao has remained in exile, reestablishing the journal Jintian as a voice for Chinese dissidents abroad. After lecturing for a time in Europe, he relocated to the United States, where he has taught at the University of Michigan, Stanford, and other schools. In addition to poetry, he has written criticism, essays, and the novella Bodong (Waves), which established him as one of China’s major prose modernists. Often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, Bei Dao has won many awards, including an honorary induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Selected Works by Bei Dao

• Taiyang cheng zhaji (1978)
• Huida (1979)
• Notes from the City of the Sun (1983, trans. by Bonnie S. McDougall)
• Waves: Stories (1985, trans. by Susette Ternent Cooke)
• The August Sleepwalker (1986, trans. by Bonnie S. McDougall; rev. ed. 1990)
• Old Snow (1991, trans. by Bonnie S. McDougall and Chen Maiping)
• Forms of Distance (1994, trans. by David Hinton)
• Landscape Over Zero (1996)
• Unlock (2000, trans. by Eliot Weinberger)

Robert Frost

American, 1874–1963

If they held an election for Great American Bard, Robert Frost would likely be the top contender. To critics and the public alike Frost remains one of the country’s most revered poets. To generations of school children who once memorized “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” he seems a national icon on a par with Benjamin Franklin or Norman Rockwell. We tend to picture him as the wise rustic bard, relating timeless human dramas in a plain-hewn New England dialect. Yet the folksy image belies a complex, often difficult man and a sophisticated “poet’s poet,” admired by such high-brows as Ezra Pound. There was nothing folksy about Frost the artist and intellect.

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, then raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the family relocated after his father’s death. He studied briefly at Dartmouth then Harvard without earning a degree. After working as a mill hand, cobbler, teacher, journalist, and farmer, Frost traveled to England in 1912 where he first gained recognition with A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). Returning in 1915, he settled on a farm in New Hampshire where he devoted himself to his poetry, lecturing periodically at Harvard and elsewhere. By 1961, when he was asked to recite at President Kennedy’s inauguration, Frost had become the best-known American poet of the 20 th century, the recipient of many honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes. Towards the end of his life Frost’s reputation declined somewhat. He came to be seen as too canonical; too conservative; too cracker barrel. His biographers had also exposed a mean, ambitious streak, which contrasted unpleasantly with the persona of the poems. The eclipse was short-lived, however. Today Frost’s stature seems assured by the fine craftsmanship and abiding popularity of such famous poems as “Mending Wall,” “The Witch of Coos,” “Fire and Ice,” and “The Death of the Hired Man.”

Most of Frost’s best-known poems are first-person narratives set in the New Hampshire farmland where he lived. Much of their appeal lies in the colloquial language, which even young readers can readily follow. Yet the countrified idiom is expertly whittled into powerful, compact forms, inspired in part by the classical poets, whom Frost admired. The poems are further enriched by their undertones of metaphysical pessimism. “I always hold that we get forward as much by hating as by loving,” Frost once chillingly remarked. This misanthropic side shows in the work. Even that schoolroom standard “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” reveals the dualism. Children like its neat, trotting rhyme scheme, the pretty picture of snow, woods, and horse. Grownups, years later perhaps, note the lullaby of darkness and indecision:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

Though Frost was often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, and evidently craved that honor, some felt that his poetry was too local in scope, reflecting a narrowness of spirit. The critic Malcolm Crowley wrote, “he is concerned chiefly with himself and his near neighbors…does not strive towards greater depth to compensate for what he lacks in breadth.” Many others, however, admired his unsurpassed ability to frame the universal in the local, the cosmic drama in the backyard chore. In the opinion of the poet and classical scholar Robert Graves, not an easy man to impress, “Frost was the first American who could be honestly reckoned a master-poet by world standards.”

Selected Works by Robert Frost

• Robert Frost: Collected Prose, Poems, and Plays (1995, Library of America)
• A Boy's Will (1913)
• North of Boston (1914)
• Mountain Interval (1916)
• New Hampshire (1923)
• West-Running Brook (1928)
• The Lovely Shall Be Choosers (1929)
• The Lone Striker (1933)
• A Further Range (1936)
• From Snow to Snow (1936)
• A Witness Tree (1942)
• Come In, and Other Poems (1943)
• Masque of Reason (1945)
• Steeple Bush (1947)
• Hard Not to be King (1951)
• The Road Not Taken and Other Poems (1993, Dover Thrift Editions)
• The Poetry of Robert Frost (2002, ed. Edward Connery Lathem)

Ted Hughes

British, 1930–1998

Despite his undoubted contributions to late 20 th-century poetry, the choice of Ted Hughes as England’s poet laureate in 1984 surprised some. From the time of his earliest work, Hughes pursued his own distinctive muse, far afield from the urbane wit and quotidian subjects of such postwar British poets as Philip Larkin and Kinsley Amis. Stark, violent, verging on nihilistic, his poems take up the primal themes of existence in a hostile cosmos, often portrayed through characterizations of animals, a motif that led some early cynics to dub him “zoo laureate.” In addition, there were the painful controversies that shackled Hughes for life to the memory of his former wife, the poet Sylvia Plath.

Born in West Yorkshire in 1930, Hughes grew up in a brooding landscape of moors and crags, where hunting trips with his brother and the harrowing war stories of his father engendered lifelong themes. At Cambridge, Hughes studied literature then anthropology, which would also play a major role in his thinking. For Hughes, poetry holds a primal, incantatory power to reconnect us with our deeper nature—a nature violent yet essential, and ignored at our peril. His earliest book of poems The Hawk in the Rain (1950) was the first of many to use animals in an almost shamanistic way to reflect on the human condition.

Hughes’ manuscript for The Hawk in the Rain was selected for publication after winning a prestigious American contest he’d been encouraged to enter by Sylvia Plath, the young American poet he’d met at a Cambridge party and married earlier that year. Young, striking, and talented, the couple were a stellar presence on the literary scene. Yet their relations reeled at times from collaborative to stormy. Separated, they had planned to divorce when Plath, sunk in depression, committed suicide in 1963. For the next three years, Hughes wrote little, devoting much of his time to editing Plath’s poetry. While some partly credited him with Plath’s posthumous acclaim, Hughes was later attacked, especially in feminist circles, for his relations with Plath and his editing of her journals.

Hughes’ fourth major book of poetry, Crow (1970), remains his most famous, hugely popular on campuses in the 1970s. Described by one critic as, “a majestic success of creative insight and imaginative reach,” Crow takes the form of a folk narrative in which the mythic crow appears as trickster, survivor, an indomitable ego foraging through the world, from moments of comic squalor (“spraddled head-down in the beach garbage, guzzling a dropped ice cream”) to horrific scenes of wartime carnage:

Bones were too like laths and twigs
Blood was too like water
Cries were too like silence
The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud
And shooting somebody through the midriff
Was too like striking a match.

After a prolific career that produced children’s literature, essays, criticism, and drama, in addition to poetry, Hughes revisited his relations with Plath in his last major book of verse, Birthday Letters (1998). Written in the form of journal entries, the poems retrace their years together in recollected moments, at times tender, then raw and fearful, then bleakly distant. Praised by many critics, the book inevitably rekindled old controversies within the literary world, replete with attacks and counterattacks. Partly as result, Birthday Letters became one of the fastest-selling poetry collections in recent decades. Hughes died of cancer the year of its publication.

Selected Works by Ted Hughes

• The Hawk in the Rain (poetry, 1957)
• Lupercal (poetry, 1960)
• The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People (juvenilia, 1963)
• Wodwo (poetry, 1967)
• Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (poetry) 1970
• Orpheus (drama, 1973)
• Moortown (poetry, 1979)
• River (poetry, 1983)
• Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth (juvenilia, 1986)
• Birthday Letters (poetry, 1998)

Kenneth Koch

American, 1925–2002

Few poets have so regaled the public and rankled the critics as Kenneth Koch. One of a group of young poets in the 1950s dubbed the “ New York School,” Koch was known for brightly inventive, exuberant wordplay that some critics found refreshing, while others dismissed as puerile. “Though he is sometimes insufferably silly, Koch is also a wit—perhaps the most polished wit writing in English, working in the discontinuous, unexpected rhythms of the Marx Brothers,” one critic stated. A less sympathetic reviewer called his first collection, Poems (1953), “tasteless, futile, noisy, and dull.”

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1925, Kenneth Koch studied at Harvard and received his Ph.D. from Columbia, where he taught English until his death in 2002. Koch, along with fellow “New York Poets” Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, set out to rescue and revitalize poetry, as they saw it, from the solemn sway of Eliot, Pound, and the great modernists. Like their wilder, druggier contemporaries the Beats, the New York Poets were influenced by surrealism, jazz, and the abstract expressionist painters with whom they occasionally collaborated or caroused. Koch made it his artistic ethos, “to discover things, to communicate them, to give pleasure, to create excitement.” His 19 books of poetry, at once sophisticated and zany, have invited comparisons to both Walt Whitman and Woody Allen. Several of the poems, such as “Fresh Air” (1962), deal satirically with poetic formality:

“Oh to be seventeen years old
Once again,” sang the red-haired man, “and not know that poetry
Is ruled with the sceptre of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!”

Koch strove to broaden poetry’s appeal. For a number of years he taught poetry to senior citizens and to children in Manhattan elementary schools, recounting his techniques in several books that remain standard resources for teachers. The popular revival of poetry today, through poetry slams, chapbooks, or—for that matter—the MTA’s “Poetry in Motion” series, owes something to Koch’s insistence on poetry as a public pleasure, open to all comers.

Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996, Koch was the recipient of many prestigious awards. In addition to poetry and his teaching books, he wrote scripts, novels, librettos, and plays. Contrasting Koch to more formal, ostensibly serious poets, his friend Frank O’Hara once remarked, “He has the other poetic gift: vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication of life. Most important of all, he is not dull.”

Selected Works by Kenneth Koch

• Poems (1953)
• Ko: or, A Season on Earth (1959)
• Sleeping with Women (1969)
• The Pleasures of Peace and Other Poems (1969)
• The Art of Love (1975)
• The Duplications (1977)
• Days and Nights (1982)
• On The Edge (1986)
• Seasons on Earth (1987)
• One Train (1994)
• Straits (1998)
• Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (prose, 1970)
• Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children (prose, 1973)
• Bertha and Other Plays (drama, 1966
• The Red Robins (drama, 1979)

Antonio Machado

Spanish, 1875–1939

Arguably Spain’s most esteemed modern poet, Antonio Machado y Ruiz was part of the intellectual movement known as the “Generation of 1898,” which included, among others, the philosopher Ortega y Gasset and the writer Miguel de Unamuno. The group sought the political and cultural revitalization of Spain after the country’s long historical decline, culminating with the economic and social crisis following defeat in the Spanish-American War. Less political than some in the movement, Machado’s poetry was characterized by philosophical melancholy, often evoking the stony landscapes and diminished glories of his homeland. “A poet of time and memory,” one critic has called him.

Machado was born on his family’s estate in Seville in 1875 and raised in Madrid. When his father’s unexpected death plunged the family in dire financial straits, Antonio and his older brother, the dramatist Manuel Machado, turned to writing and acting for a living. In 1899 the two brothers traveled to Paris, the cultural mecca of the day, where they studied, worked as translators, and met such literarati as Ruben Dario and Oscar Wilde. Here Machado discovered modernism and the French symbolist poetry that would visibly influence his work in the years to come.

After moving back to Spain, Machado settled in Castile, where the barren landscape, steeped in local legend, formed the backdrop for his first collection of poems, Soledades (1903). Somber and introspective, the poems’ lyrical reflections on nature and the soul captured a national sense of loss. They instantly established their author as one of Spain’s leading voices. Similar themes appeared in Compos de Castilla (1912), Machado’s best known work. These poems once again link metaphysical themes to the landscape of Castile. They also include more explicitly political themes, observations on literary friendships, and a final group of poems devoted to Machado’s young wife Leonora, who had died tragically at age 21, just five years after their marriage. The loss affected Machado deeply and was a topic he returned to often in his work.

A lifelong student of philosophy, Machado turned increasingly in his later years to shorter, aphoristic poems or “proverbs” with philosophical themes and a cryptic tone sometimes likened to Zen koans. For many readers, especially outside of Spain, these are Machado’s signature works, among them his famous and variously translated, “Traveler, there are no roads…”

Wayfarer, the road
Is your footsteps, nothing else.
Wayfarer, there is no road
You open it as you walk it.
The walking opens the road
And when you turn your eyes back
You see the path you’ll never
Walk again.
Wayfarer, there is no road,
But wakes on the sea.

Though he constantly revised work and his literary output was never large, Machado also produced essays, philosophical papers, and speeches, as well as several plays in collaboration with his brother Manuel. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 caused a painful rift between the brothers, Manuel siding with Franco and the fascists, Antonio with the leftist republic. As violence spread and Franco’s troops advanced, Antonio relocated from Madrid to Barcelona, then fled with his mother and a stream of refugees across the border to France. After a harsh journey on foot through the Pyrenees, Machado died in the French village of Collioure; his mother followed him to the grave three days later.

Selected English Editions by Antonio Machado

• Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (2003)
• Selected Poems of Antonio Machado , (1978, trans. by Betty Jean Craige)
• The Dream Below the Sun: Selected Poems (1981, trans. by Barnstone)
• Twenty Proverbs (1981, trans. by Robert Bly and Don Olsen)
• Selected Poems and Prose (1983, ed. by Dennis Maloney, trans. by Bly and others)
• The Landscape of Soria , (1985, trans. by Maloney)
• Antonio Machado: Selected Poems (1988, Alan Trueblood)

Bronislaw Maj

Polish, 1953–

A journalist, professor of modern Polish literature, and the author of seven books of poetry, Bronislaw Maj has been a leading figure in Polish literary circles since the early 1980s—part of a national literary and cultural scene described recently by the editors of the Chicago Review as “the richest and most vibrant in Europe.”

Born in 1953, Maj stands midpoint in the generational divide marked by the fall of Poland’s communist regime in 1989. His first book of poetry appeared in 1980, coinciding with the rise of the Solidarity Movement, a time when the country’s leading writers and poets were identified with themes of political resistance. As the democracy movement unfolded, some writers of the “Solidarity Generation” wondered aloud if freedom might bring a loss of artistic relevance and inspiration, or as one put it, “Would poetry become…the food of a handful of bored experts?”

As it turns out, democracy has brought a flurry of creative output—along with a paradoxical crisis of freedom, as formerly censored works flooded bookstores, market-values trumped political concerns, and cultural styles naturally shifted. By the 1990s, Poland’s literary limelight had been captured by a younger generation of post-communist poets dubbed the “New Barbarians,” many of whom flaunted a bumptious, me-first, Beat-influenced style, and rejected the earnest tones and political themes of their elders.

Maj’s poems gracefully transcend such cultural vicissitudes. They seem, in fact, uncannily suited to moments of transition. They often fix upon some daily sight in his native Krakow—or any city, for that matter—illuminating inner complexities, transforming the ordinary moment into a bleak epiphany, not overtly moralizing, yet charged with moral and historical significance, as in the short poem “Left Over”:

It passes—without sentiment and metaphysics.
I cut across the Rynek. On Szpitalna Street
glum workers, drunk from the morning,
lazily wreck an old town house, left over
from the Polish days. The brick dust sinks in the mud
on the street. It’s December, Tuesday, not long till
the holidays.

Though his work is far from the in-your-face style of the New Barbarians, Maj has nonetheless been cited as a powerful influence on the more “classically minded” of Poland’s younger poets. His countryman the poet and critic Stanislaw Baranczak says of his poems, they “grasp the sense of existence in all the complications of its internal contradictions.” Yet remain morally relevant. “In all his poetry Bronislaw Maj confirms the simple truth that a consistent metaphysical poet cannot, in the final analysis, be anything other than a moralist.”

In addition to his seven books of poetry, Maj is also the author of a book about Tadeusz Gajcy, a poet who died in the Warsaw uprising of 1944.

Selected Works by Bronislaw Maj

• Wiersze (Poems, 1980)
• Taka wolnosc (Such Freedom, 1981)
• Wspolne powietrze (Common Air, 1981)
• Album rodzinny (Family Album, 1986)
• Zmeczenie (Exhaustion, 1986)
• Zaglada Swietego Miasta (Annihilation of the Holy City, 1986)

Katha Pollitt

American, 1949–

A regular columnist for the liberal weekly The Nation as well as a poet, essayist, and critic, Katha Pollitt stands in the fine tradition—more common in Europe than America—of the poet as artist and public correspondent, eloquent in verse and newsprint alike.

Pollitt’s prose and poetry, however, pursue diverging paths. Her “Subject to Debate” columns for The Nation are sharp, witty, topical. A frequent critic of cultural conservatism, Pollitt is best known for her writings on feminism, where she often parts company with postmodern orthodoxy. She is a principled defender of strict gender equality, attacking “post-feminist” writers such a Germaine Greer, Carol Gilligan, and others who celebrate the unique cultural identity or special “nurturing” qualities of women. “Like Broadway, the novel, and God, feminism has been declared dead many times,” Pollitt wrote in the opening of Reasonable Creatures (1994), her first collection of essays. In that book, Pollitt torpedoes conservatives and liberals alike on high-profile issues, from “Murphy Brown” to the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. Blending personal anecdotes, humor, and rigorous cultural analysis, the essays are themselves fine examples of creative nonfiction at its best.

A different facet of mind emerges in Pollitt’s poetry. Her first book of poems Antarctica Traveler (1982) wowed many critics as an exceptionally accomplished first volume. One reviewer called it “A stunning collection. One that I recommend to anyone who is discouraged about the state of American letters.” Vivid metaphors shine throughout, as in this sonorous rendering of an eggplant from one of the book’s five “Vegetable Poems”:

Like a dark foghorn in the yellow kitchen
we imagine the eggplant's
melancholy bass
booming its pompous operative sorrows
a prince down on his luck….

At the heart of the collection are “Five Poems from Japanese Paintings,” which combine intense introspective with a calm, reflective distance that echoes the manner of the Japanese artists themselves. “Whether inspired by paintings or daily surroundings,” one reviewer noted, “Pollitt’s poems are marked by a beautiful economy of line, a selective cherishing of detail.”

Born in Brooklyn and a current resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Pollitt graduated from Radcliff and Columbia. She has taught at Barnard, Princeton, and the New School. Her poetry, criticism, and essays, which appear regularly in The New Yorker as well as The Nation, have been recognized with a number of awards, including the National Magazine Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.

Selected Works by Katha Pollitt

• Reasonable Creatures Vintage Books (essays, 1995)
• Antarctic Traveler (poems, 1982)
• Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (essays, 2001)