Robert Lowell On March 1, 1917, Robert Lowell was born into one of Boston’s oldest and most prominent families. He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.  Lowell contributed a lot for American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 60. Robert Lowell served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977. To Speak of Woe in Marriage has a free verse with simple rhyming couplets structure. In this poem Robert Lowell writes about sex without actually saying the word 'sex'. It is about how a woman is suffering in her marriage due to her husband’s abusive attitude and behavior. It is overall in a feeling of despair and pain. The woman in the poem is afflicted with an ...

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas is an autobiographical poem in which Thomas uses the memories of childhood days in order to explore the theme of a journey from innocence to experience. The theme is based on William Blake’s division the world of experience and it is reinforced through the use of Wordsworthian double consciousness. Dylan Thomas is one of the writers who have often been associated with Welsh literature and culture in the last sixty years; furthermore, he is possibly the most notable Welsh author. Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. After he left school at the age of sixteen, he started working as a journalist in Swansea. At that time, he also started writing, notably short stories and essays. Thomas also published radio-plays that have been broadcast on the BBC, such as “Under Milk Wood”, which portrays typical Welsh peasants. Moreover, he wrote numerous poems of which “Fern Hill” is the best known. It was part of a sequence of Thomas´s poetry, named “Deat...

Theodore Roethke Theodore Huebner Roethke hardly fits anyone’s image of the stereotypical high-minded poet-intellectual of the 1940s through 1960s. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, his father was a German immigrant who owned and ran a 25-acre greenhouse. Though as a child he read a great deal and as a high school freshman he had a Red Cross campaign speech translated into 26 languages, he suffered from issues of abandonment and loss, and his lack of self-esteem led him to strive to be accepted by peers. When he was 14, his father died of cancer and his uncle committed suicide. He attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he adopted a tough, bear-like image (weighing over 225 pounds) and even developed a fascination with gangsters. Eccentric and nonconformist—he later called himself “odious” and “unhappy”—Roethke desired for a friend with whom he could talk and relate his ambitions. Poet and writer James Dickey once named Roethke the greatest of all American poet...