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=**Robert Frost** (1874-1963)= = = Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, CA in 1893 and although he grew up in the city, much of his written works depict rural life. He was well educated, attending Dartmouth College and, later, Harvard University, where he married Elinor Miriam White. Though he never graduated, he later received honorary diplomas from here and several other distinguished universities. His life was frequently praised for his work –including four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. He taught at several colleges over the span of his life and even read one of his poems during President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961. Though his life was filled with accomplishment and honor, his personal life was filled with grief and sadness. He and his wife and mother all suffered from depression, his father died when he was 11 from tuberculosis, his mom died of cancer when he was 26, and his wife died of heart failure in 1938 when he was 64. Only two of his children outlived him with his son Carol committing suicide, daughter Elinor dying right after her birth, daughter Majorie dying from childbirth, son Elliot dying of cholera, and his daughter Irma dying in a mental institution, a disease that ran in his family. This accounted for the underlying messages of loss in his poems and philosophical themes. His realistic, New England, and conversational writing has touched numerous hearts throughout the years and his significance on American poetry will live on forever.

**Fire a nd Ice **
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

=**Analysis**=  Taken literally, Frost in his poem //Fire and Ice// seems to be talking about how the world will ultimately end and possibly what life after death will be like. Is hell filled with unbearable flames and heat or is it the opposite, a place filled with shrilling cold and numbness? At first, Frost chooses fire but says if he had to feel this kind of paining death again he would choose ice. In this poem, I believe Frost may be talking about loss instead of death itself. With the many indicators of the loss in his life, this would seem to be the appropriate course; however, I can also relate to the concepts he may be showing about the grieving process. When you lose someone or you have to go through significant life-changing turmoil your mind tends to go through waves of hate or anger and also just lack of feeling anything. At first, in the poem, he says "From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire." When you feel like someone has been taken from you that you held close in your life, others would understand that you may feel emotions of anger towards God or just the situation and desire for them to come back to you; sometimes you even get lost in these "why me?" scenarios. Then, in the poem, he says "if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice". Here, I believe he is trying to say that sometimes you are hurt so much, or sometimes multiple bad things happen to you, that you just shut down and instead decide to feel nothing, or numb yourself as ice would do to someone literally.

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=**Edna St. Vincent Millay (Pen name: Nancy Boyd)** (1892-1950) = = =  Known for her alternative and bohemian style, Edna St. Vincent Millay life was very unique and groundbreaking for her time. Growing up poor in Rockland, Maine her mom and her moved often relying on their friends and family members until settling at her aunt’s house in Camden, Maine. Though she was poor, she never moved without her favorite classical works like Shakespeare and Milton and her poetry writing turned heads even from an early age. Her mom encouraged her to be independent and out-spoken, which probably was very influential for her writing. Millay went to Vassar College, an all-girls school, where she began having intimate relationships with many of her female classmates. Her famous love affairs continued throughout her life, even after her marriage to Eugen Jan Boissevain in 1923; they had an open relationship where they dated other people. Boissevain supported his wife’s writing accomplishments and, unconventionally for the time, took care of most of the domestic household responsibilities. Millay moved to New York City after college and lived and worked in the now famous Cherry Lane Theatre which she turned into a playhouse that many famous people performed in such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Barbara Streisand, and Bob Dylan. Her life was honored several times with winning both the Frost Medal for her contributions to American poetry and with being the first women to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Though dying at the young age of 58, a year after her husband’s, she had stunning successes and groundbreaking accomplishments throughout her life. 

**I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently[[image:193054.JPG width="436" height="300" align="right"]]**
 I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two.

=**Analysis** =  This poem really connected with me; I can completely feel and understand how she must have felt during the time she wrote this poem. Millay uses commas and semicolons in a great way to make us stop after reading those lines and make us reflect on what we have just read, as if to say these are the most important lines or the images/thoughts her mind cannot escape from. I took this poem quite literally; I don't believe there to be any hidden meaning or symbolism in it. It is about regretting the things we wish we said or shown to someone we knew we loved but may have been too prideful or scared to open up to. In her writing, she says "I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest world I flung in jest". "Jest" means to laugh something off and I am all too familiar to making serious moments a joke for fear that things may get awkward or may lead to some actual serious and meaningful moment. She continues, "And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways." In this part of the poem, she is recognizing that he (or she, as the case may be) was able to show love back and did love her regardless of her foolish ways ("follies flung aside") and "wicked ways". She may also be going through a scenario here of what could have been if she did put her foolishness aside and instead showed her real self -"naked" from unwillingness and pride. But as the poem ends, she realizes time can never be turned back and you can't change what now is. She lost this possible love and now she is simply a "ghost in marble" that will always be in his memory but nothing more. It is a sad poem but hopefully a poem that you can learn from; possibly it is sending a message to say don't let your chances pass you by. Take every moment and cherish it and don't take it for granted because you never know when you'll get those opportunities again.

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 =**Langston Hughes** (1902-1967) = = =  As a poet, a novelist, a playwright, and a columnist, Langston Hughes not only influenced many aspects of literature but influenced black culture as well. He was one of the first and most influential people of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s, a time when black artists and intellectuals grew substantially in their cultural and artistic creativities that would help influence all of the arts in modern day America. Hughes was raised mostly by his grandmother, who instilled in him a great sense of racial pride and helped influence much of his writing in his lifetime. Throughout his childhood and adulthood he traveled or lived all over the United States and the world, including Lawrence, KS, Lincoln, IL, Cleveland, OH, Washington D.C., and even places in Europe and Africa but he called Harlem in New York home for most of his adult life. His father, though they had a bad relationship and his father disapproved of his writing endeavors, paid for his studies at Columbia University, which Hughes went for a few years and later went to Lincoln University to get his B.A. degree. Hughes’s writing was fueled by the lower-income black communities of Harlem and the prejudices they faced, the culture and art they invented, and devoted his life to breaking the black stereotypes he faced, and placing a sense of black nationalism and pride in the African American community. He encourage social equality and become a famous, influential figure during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and a voice to young black American during that time. Due to the lowering confidence after the Great Depression, Hughes became a Communist, which he eventually strayed from after the infamous McCarthy Hearings of the 1950’s. Hughes’s works were praised with several awards during his life including the Harmon Gold Medal for literature in 1930 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. His works still resonate in the works of several black and white writers and artists of today and though he died at 65 from prostate cancer, his life’s legacy will continue to live on.

=Democracy= Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need.

I live here, too. I want freedom Just as you.

=**Analysis** =  Put literally, Hughes is making a strong stance and putting his foot down to say he is demanding the same freedoms that every other American share. He is tired of hearing other people say "Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day." He is calling for action in this poem, possibly not from African Americans themselves but the government or possibly demanding a change in the way blacks were viewed at the time. I like in the first stanza his structure is breaking down and then in the second stanza he builds up the structuring of the words. I believe he did this on purpose; in the first stanza he is talking about freedom not coming and cuts the lines short as to try to scare the reader from losing freedom. Then, in the second stanza, he is talking about standing on his own feet and being able to look into the future and have land (a tangible asset) and, therefore, builds himself up for his argument just as the writing shows. I feel owning land, especially in early America, is a profoundly strong thing for a man; it seems to be a tangible way of showing your worth to the country. I think this is why he references to owning the land and also refers to freedom as a "seed". The final stanza is concise and to the point. Hughes is talking directly to his reader and is trying to show that we all want the same things and come from the same land, thus, we should be all equal. A lot of Hughes's poetry talks strictly about African American struggles but I feel like this poem could be connect with several people looking to fight against tyranny or oppression and seek democracy and a voice. It reminded me of a great scene in the 1992 film //Far and Away// and I tried very hard to find it to attach it to this analysis but I couldn't. In the scene, the Irish-native protagonist, Joseph, is talking to his dying father who tells him that the most powerful thing a man can possess in life is land and that land has a way of opening doors for all sorts of other obstacles in life. It would have fit this poem perfectly as I think this poem sends a similar message.

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=**Gwendolyn Brooks** (1917-2000) =  Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, KS to a father that was both a runaway slave and soldier in the Civil War. Brooks’s mother encouraged her at a young age to be informed and independent on her race and culture, especially during the Harlem Renaissance; her mother even took her to meet Langston Hughes. She had a loving home; however, she witnessed much racial prejudice at school. She actually attended several different schools, an all-white school, an all-black school, and an integrated school, which helped her later in her writing about the different social and racial dynamics in the city. She wrote even at a young age and participated in poetry workshops, eventually leading her to teach at several colleges and universities. Her work focused on racial equality but had the ability to relate to people of all colors. She was praised and awarded several times throughout her life including being the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, getting a Guggenheim Fellowship, being invited by JFK to read at the Library of Congress, being made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, and inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fall in 1988, among other awards. She married Henry Blakely and had two children and died at 83 after a short battle with cancer in Chicago, IL. Gwendolyn Brooks died just nine years short of being about to witness the first African-American president of the United States, but her ability to break down barriers of race inequality definitely had a influence on this history-making event.

The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men
They had supposed their formula was fixed.

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<span style="color: #324d3c; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> They had obeyed instructions to devise A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze. But when the Negroes came they were perplexed. These Negroes looked like men. Besides, it taxed Time and the temper to remember those Congenital iniquities that cause Disfavour of the darkness. Such as boxed Their feelings properly, complete to tags- <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> A box for dark men and a box for Other- <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> Would often find the contents had been scrambled. Or even switched. Who really gave two figs? Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled. And there was nothing startling in the weather.

<span style="color: #6c6c0f; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif;"> = **Analysis** = <span style="color: #272159; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif;"> I feel to start with analysis of this poem it is important to look at the title, as I felt it to be the most profound of all the lines. When Brooks entitled the poem "The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men" I believe she is referring to the Civil War and it has an immediate reaction from the reader. It is a very different way of looking at things and she explains in the poem itself that the officers had certain "formulas" to follow and "instructions" to obey, which made it easy for these white officers to look at their soldiers as just another number in the battlefield. However, she continues to say that these officers realized they could look past the color of their skin and saw they were men and battle is too stressful a time and it was too "taxing" to remember the social pressures that usually would have made these same officers not even converse with black people. The poem ends with her saying that there was no point to separate black from white at the time because "Who really gave two figs?". I believe she is trying to say at such a painstaking and stressful time of war, all the social and cultural stereotypes and inequalities become irrelevant because, in the end, that negativism does not matter. I can see this occurring especially in a war situation because that is a time when the people you fight with, regardless of color, background, or religion are all banded by the same goals and become much like brothers who hold one another's lives in their hands. I like how at the beginning she has sentence structure and ends her verses with periods but towards the end there is different punctuation used and sometimes no periods at all. I think this reflects on the meaning of the poem because, as I said, in the beginning officers are given certain orders to follow or assumptions to hold as society tells them but in the end war takes away those formulas just as in the poem we look at the words themselves rather than the grammar because the punctuation is no longer there. <span style="color: #6c6c0f; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif;">

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=<span style="color: #4b4771; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">**Allen Ginsberg** (1926-1997) = = = <span style="color: #4b4771; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;"> Allen Ginsberg led a unique life and was one of the founders of the Beat Generation, a modernist literature time of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that focused on the way him and his colleagues saw the country growingly conforming and the bad effects of materialism and their way of critiquing this kind of lifestyle. Ginsberg was Jewish and born in Newark, NJ and attended school at Montclair State College and Columbia University. Him and his close friends of the Beat Generation, like Lucian Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs, all shared the same fundamental beliefs and shared the hope for the future potential of the youth of America and free speech. In Ginsberg’s private life, he was an open homosexual and lived in San Francisco with his life partner, Peter Orlovsky, for most of his adult life. He also was a supporter of the Communist Party, protested against the Vietnam War, was outspoken about politics, an open drug user, supporter of gay rights, a member of NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association), and supporter of worker’s rights. His writing reflected all these things and frequently was shocking with his blatant language and use of sometime crude or explicit writing. This is especially seen in his most famous poem, “Howl”, which helped him become a professional poet for the rest of his life. He help found the poetry magazine //Beatitude// and wrote and shared a lot of his work in a lodging house with his friends, called the Beat Hotel. Many of his poems he read aloud and was accompanied with music, chanting, and sometimes even a guitarist. Ginsberg died at the age of 70 from prostate cancer but his work was incredible unique, inventive, and revolutionary which had significant impacts on this hippie generations of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

=<span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**A Supermarket in California** = <span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?



=**Analysis**= <span style="color: #0e6767; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif;"> Ginsberg has such a unique way of writing that completely differs from all my previous poems. His verses are long and seem like run-on sentences of not sentences at all. His poetry feels much like a conversation with himself, like a journal entry he has written with information/gossip we as the reader don't know about. In the poem's literal sense, we can journey along with Ginsberg as he enters this neon-colored supermarket at night looking for something to eat and circling in and out of the isles observing the people more than the food. Throughout the poem, he is very judgmental and suspicious of what the other shoppers are doing in the supermarket. I love his the style of his writing and his choice of fruits for the way they read aloud, especially in the verse "Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! -and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?". I wanted to know what the connection between him and Walt Whitman was and it turns out he is also mentioned in his most famous work "Howl" and this poem was a dedication to him on Whitman's centennial year of his famous work //Leaves of Grass//. In the poem, the customers are shopping with two dead, famous writers, Whitman and Lorca; both of these writer were homosexuals like Ginsberg. In a satirical way, Ginsberg points this out in the line "I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eying the grocery boys", which I think it kind of funny. In the poem, these two writers are being compared to the time and culture of Ginsberg's time. Since the time of these famous writers where the value of their writing focused on intangible thoughts like truth and love, now the value is shown in actual values of goods. Ginsberg is mocking modern culture for their materialism and concern for gossip over actual, real value, which he saw in famous writers like Whitman and Lorca's work.

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