Paul Zweig

A poet, critic and memoirist, Zweig was admired by his friends and the literary circles around him, but remains in wider obscurity to this day. Zweig was an obsessive study of culture, peoples and moods. Cross pollination is clear in Zweig’s work, his techniques as a memoirist clear across his poetry. A careful and astute eye, self-possessed and self-aware, he wrote as if with a magnifying glass, looking at the offhand nature of the world and reading the truth from it. While he looked outwards, he found himself everywhere. He journeyed deeper into the self with each evocative work.

Jack Spicer

Spicer saw the poet as a radio, intercepting transmissions from outer space. Language was furniture, through which information navigated. He was a radical, both in his literary style and in his life, defying every convention at every turn. Refusing to allow his work to be copyrighted, Spicer ran a workshop called ‘Poetry as Magic’, and for him the statement was true. Poetry was a means to experience and translate the unexplainable, and had to be freely available for those who searched for truth. Spicer died penniless and with only small acclaim, like so many poets before and after him, but the ideas he laid out in his work have gone on to influence thousands of poets after him.

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka was many things, and many things to many people. The most significant black poet of his generation, Baraka also is considered the founder of the Black Arts Movement and the Second Harlem Renaissance. Baraka wanted poetry, literature and art to be a legitimate product of experience. In doing so, he could hold a mirror up to a world in desperate need of self reflection. He was as fearless in his writing as he was in his activism, and he had a clear vision. The BAM became an aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power and Baraka’s voice was the most poignant, cutting and profound.

Denise Levertov

Levertov was staunchly independent, refusing to allow her work to be categorised or her person to be defined. She worked across genres, wrote across styles and lived across continents. Born in England in 1923, she grew up in a deeply literary household; her mother would read the great English poets aloud each night while her father brought home second-hand books of Russian, Hebrew, German and English poetry and let them slowly pile up in every room. As soon as she learnt to write, she was writing poetry and by the age of 12 had a correspondence with T.S. Elliot who offered her poetic advice. Moving to America after the war, having published multiple books already, Levertov fell in with the Black Mountain Poets, experimental, naturalist and socially conscious and she began to shake the clothes of English Romanticism to begin projecting through content and feeling rather than strict meter of form. She would shape-shift stylistically throughout her life, writing quietly passionate poems that ranged from spiritually mystic to potently political. Throughout it all, she remained deeply, romantically in love with the world she depicted, even when she criticised it. Poetry was a vehicle of her independence, and she was loyal to its form for her whole life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Now more famous for his writing about poetry than for his poems themselves, Rilke’s verses were revolutionary in his lifetime. Born to a German-speaking family in Prague in 1875, Rilke never felt at home in the cultures that surrounded him, rigorously defined by morality and religion as they were. Instead, he sought his inspiration elsewhere and found it, ultimately, upon his travels to Russia. It was there he developed a philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. He would write with Christian imagery and make references to God, but for him God was a life force accessible only through art, not the recognisable Judeo-Christian God of the time. Religion, he said, was the art of the uncreative. But his heresy was well disguised by the lyricism of his work and as he progressed, Rilke’s writing shifted towards idea of the purpose of life and the poets role in society. In his non-fiction masterpiece ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rilke shared a worldview he developed over many years. One that understood pain as essential to life, and valued the true and simple things that could be accessed only through reflection and creation. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses”, he said, “who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was the matriarch of the roaring 20s. From her salon apartment in Paris which she shared with Alice B. Toklas, Stein steered the course of 20th century culture, providing a meeting place for the artists, writers and thinkers who were shaping modernity. She launched, inspired or nurtured the work of Picasso, Matisse, James Joyce, Hemingway, Juan Gris, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound and almost every other member of the ‘Lost Generation’, a phrase Stein herself coined. A patron, collector and guide for so many artists, Stein’s role as a poet and writer is often overlooked. Yet what some of her brood were doing for visual arts, Stein was attempting with words. Rejecting the linear rigidity of 19th century, she pioneered a dense, experimental, process-oriented type of writing. Famously elusive about meaning, her work is stream of consciousness and devoid of clear plot. Her poems are verbal collages — how the cubists treated images, Stein treated words and once you have entered the world she creates, it is hard to return to mundanity. Stein’s poems were never commercially viable, yet they quietly infiltrated culture, informing and inspiring a new way of writing. To read them today is to still be shocked by their novelty, but also to encounter something uncomfortably familiar and contemporary.

William Butler Yeats

Yeats aligned himself with his Irish heritage early on and it came to define his work. Equally staunch to his Irishness as he was to his identity as an artist, he was firm in his self-image and a willing martyr for his own poetry. He was driven by these characteristics, but also by his membership to the Golden Dawn, a secret society practicing the occult and ritual magic. Yeats’ artistic ambitions clashed with his occult ideas – he wanted to write work grounded in the physical world yet in private he concerned himself with visions of a higher plane. The resulting work exists in a state of conflict, he moves between symbolism of ordinary Irish life and occult and mystic ideas. In the end, Yeats saw the magic in his own country and the visions he saw were translated by the ground he walked on into something altogether unique.

Sei Shōnagon

Sei Shōnagon was a Japanese author, poet and court lady who served the Empress Teishi around 1000 AD. During this time, she kept a diary which has since become known as The Pillow Book: a collection of gossip, lists, musings, poems, and observations about the inanities and mundanities of everyday life. It concerns no great events, nor great historical figures — rather it is a rare and remarkable glimpse into the mind of a regular citizen who existed a millennium ago. Shōnagon wrote with honesty, never intending for her work to be published, and in doing so inadvertently created an essential artefact. Her poetry is much the same; she wrote it for herself, expressing the feelings and emotions we all go through in a way that made sense for her. To read her work is to get a profound sense of time-travelling, and to feel the distance between the past and the present shrink with each sentiment. Shōnagon’s problems, musings and queries are much the same as ones we have today. The unadulterated experience of existence is consistent through eras, dynasties and nations — we are all still sometimes unsure of ‘who’s there when I say I’.

Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara was the de-facto leader of the ‘New York School’ of poets. The name was also used by the fledgling Abstract Expressionists who, alongside O’Hara and his poets, ruled the underground New York Art Scene throughout the 50s. Working as first a clerk and then an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara created a new form of poetry, less formal and more accessible than what had come before. He wrote his poems quickly, dashing them off at work, in his lunch break (famously titling his greatest poetry collection ‘Lunch Poems’) and in meetings filled with people. They read almost as prose, meditations on the contemporary world around him and highly representative of the era and, often, the very day he wrote them. Here was part of O’Hara’s genius – he removed poetry from the requirements of eternity and made it something contemporary. In his comfort with the disposability of his work, he held a mirror to his time that still reflects today.

Joyce Carol Oates

One of the most prolific American writers of the 20th Century, Joyce-Carol Oates makes work of remarkable duality. A novelist, essayist, historical biographer, and poet, she writes from the gutter looking at the stars. Unflinchingly honest and occasional brutal in its realism, her work also has moments of unadulterated magic, of gothic romanticism and pure fantasy run amok. She writes of America, the nation as she sees it across time. It is, for her, an idea that permeates its landscape and people, the flaws and beauty of the country present in its occupants. While less known for her poems, they are able to distills the grand ideas that exist across her writing into potent moments of violent beauty. “I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader” says Oates, “and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements.”

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was little known during her lifetime. Reclusive and eccentric, most of her relationships took the form of correspondences. As a child from a well-to-do New England family, she developed a terrible fear of the ‘deepening menace’ of death as so many figures close to her died, starting from her childhood and continuing into adulthood. She found solace and refuge in poetry, writing in anonymity. Of the 1,800 poems she wrote, only 10 were published in her lifetime and these were heavily altered by editors to fit the literary norms of the day. Dickinson wrote unlike any of her contemporaries – short lines, sparse punctuation, slant rhymes and no titles, she developed a personal language of poetry that has since become the standard. Turning her fear of death into art, she wrote about immortality and the finitude of life, aesthetics and spirituality. In her quiet solitude she captured the intangible truth of existence.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver stood on the precipice of nature. In the minutiae of the world around her, she saw herself. Her poems are quiet and contemplative, often regarding the small and the overlooked. She deals in the motionless ponds, the barn mouse, the swaying trees and the thin horizon where the sea meets the sky. It is on this horizon where her work lives, in the space between the human and the animal. She understood the primality of the world around her but believed in a greater power that existed alongside it. Oliver was a visionary, breathing new life and mystery into the familiar with her words. She never stopped writing until her death in 2019 at the age of 83.

James Schuyler

James Schuyler's career began as a typist and secretary for W.H Auden. At 23, he moved with Auden to the Gulf of Naples, attending The University of Florence. On return to America, he lived with John Ashberry and Frank O’Hara. Schuyler was an observer, a figure on the edge of important scenes for 20 years. Transcendental in nature, he was quiet and intimate, saying only the right thing at the right time and nothing more. His poems then, unsurprisingly, are revelatory in their magnification. He sees the small and mundane and finds the beauty. In only his observations, he reveals something the rest of us missed.