Facultad de Filosofía y Ciencias Humanas Literatura Norteamericana Name: Johana Gómez Exercises Talk about: Adrienne Rich. Awards and Honors. Notable Works Adrienne Rich is one of the most influential feminist writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her collections of poems and essays won numerous awards over her lifetime and since her death. Famous Poems ‘Diving into the Wreck’ is the title poem of the collection for which Rich won the National Book Award for Poetry. The poem opens with the speaker preparing for a deep-sea dive. ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a clever and multilayered poem that describes a woman’s needlepoint project. ‘Living in Sin’ is filled with poignant images that depict a woman’s romantic relationship and the disappointment of reality. ‘Dreamwood’ describes the nature of poetry. The speaker describes the seemingly basic details of her typing desk. It is an extremely functional item but it also contains all the markings of a landscape-like map. ‘Amends’ is a beautiful poem that describes the movement of moonlight as it traces and soaks into the surface of the earth. Robert Lowells. Awards and Honors. Notable Works Robert Lowell, Jr., was an American poet noted for his complex, autobiographical poetry. Lowell grew up in Boston. James Russell Lowell was his great-granduncle, and Amy, Percival, and A. Lawrence Lowell were distant cousins. Although he turned away from his Puritan heritage—largely because he was repelled by what he felt was the high value it placed on the accumulation of money—he continued to be fascinated by it, and it forms the subject of many of his poems. During World War II, Lowell was sentenced, for conscientious objection, to a year and a day in the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut, and he served five months of his sentence. His poem “In the Cage” from Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) comments on this experience, as does in greater detail “Memories of West Street and Lepke” in Life Studies (1959). His first volume of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944), deals with a world in crisis and the hunger for spiritual security. Lord Weary’s Castle, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, exhibits greater variety and command. It contains two of his most praised poems: “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” elegizing Lowell’s cousin Warren Winslow, lost at sea during World War II, and “Colloquy in Black Rock,” celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi. In 1947 Lowell was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now poet laureate consultant in poetry), a position he held for one year. Lowell’s activities in the civil-rights and antiwar campaigns of the 1960s lent a more public note to his next three books of poetry: For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), and Notebook 1967–68 (1969). The last-named work is a poetic record of a tumultuous year in the poet’s life and exhibits the interrelation between politics, the individual, and his culture. Lowell’s trilogy of plays, The Old Glory, which views American culture over the span of history, was published in 1965 (rev. ed. 1968). His later poetry volumes include The Dolphin (1973), which won him a second Pulitzer Prize, and Day by Day (1977). His translations include Phaedra (1963) and Prometheus Bound (1969); Imitations (1961), free renderings of various European poets; and The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (1968).
