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Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke evolved a special language evoking the "greenhouse world" of tiny insects and unseen roots. His love poems in Words for the Wind (1958) celebrate beauty and desire with innocent passion. One poem begins: "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, / When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them." -
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Elizabeth Bishop
Bishop wrote highly crafted poems in a descriptive style that contains hidden philosophical depths. -
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John Berryman
John Berryman's life paralleled Robert Lowell's in some respects. Specializing in traditional forms and meters, he was inspired by early American history and wrote self-critical, confessional poems in his Dream Songs (1969) -
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ROBERT LOWELL
He was the most influential poet of the period. Lowell's early books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed great control of traditional forms and styles, strong feeling, and an intensely personal yet historical vision. Lowell's transformation, a watershed for poetry after the war, opened the way for many younger writers. -
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Richard Hugo
Hugo wrote nostalgic, confessional poems in bold iambics about shabby, forgotten small
towns in his part of the United States; he wrote of shame, failure, and rare moments of
acceptance through human relationships. -
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James Dickey
Dickey flew in World War II and wrote of the agony of war. He yearned for revitalizing contact with the world -- a contact he sought in nature (animals, the wild), sexuality, and physical exertion. -
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Anne Sexton
Like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton was a passionate woman who attempted to be wife, mother,
and poet on the eve of the women's movement in the United States.
Sexton's confessional poetry thrust taboo subjects into close focus. Often they daringly introduce female topics such as childbearing, the female body, or marriage seen from a woman's point of view -
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Philip Levine
He has been the voice for the lonely individual caught up in industrial America. Much of his poetry is somber and reflects an anarchic tendency amid the realization that systems of government will endure. -
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Adrienne Rich
Rich began by writing poems in traditional form and meter, her works, particularly those written after she became an ardent feminist in the 1980s, embody strong emotions. -
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Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath lived an outwardly exemplary life, winning a Fulbright grant to Cambridge University in
England.
Plath worked against the clock to produce a series of stunning poems before she committed
suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen. These poems were collected in the volume Ariel
(1965), two years after her death.