Favorite Poets (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was orphaned at the age of three and adopted by a wealthy Virginia family with whom he had a troubled relationship. He excelled in his studies of language and literature at school, and self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827. In 1830, Poe embarked on a career as a writer and began contributing reviews and essays to popular periodicals. He also wrote sketches and short fiction, and in 1833 published his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Over the next five years he established himself as a master of the short story form through the publication of "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-tale Heart," and other well-known works. In 1841, he wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," generally considered the first modern detective story. The publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845 brought him additional fame as a poet.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born in Long Island, the second of nine children. He spent much of his early life in Brooklyn, where his formal education ended before he was teenager. After learning the printing trade and teaching for five years, he moved to New York City where he worked as a newspaper journalist and editor. It was there that he wrote his first book, a temperance novel called Franklin Evans (1842). In 1848, he traveled south as far as New Orleans, where he wrote for a local newspaper. The experiences from his brief trip and his reading deepened his sense that "the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poems." While continuing as a newspaper writer and editor in New York, Whitman worked on a volume of poetry, which he published anonymously in 1855 as Leaves of Grass. Thanks to his relentless self-promotion and the support of editors and literary figures including most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, his reputation bloomed despite the book's modest sales. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he went to Virginia to search for his wounded soldier brother; then, settling in Washington, D.C., he labored as a volunteer in hospitals and then took a government job. In 1865, he published Drum-Taps, a book of poems later assimilated into Leaves of Grass; fifteen years later, he gathered together miscellaneous prose writings in Specimen Days. During his life, he issued no fewer than nine expanded, revised editions of Leaves of Grass, the final version, the so-called "Death-Bed" edition published in 1892, the year of his death.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was the progeny of a well-off, well-educated family in Amherst, Massachusetts. The poet was born, lived, and died in the house they called the Homestead. Though she traveled little, she wrote prolifically, maintaining extensive correspondences even with near neighbors and writing poetry, which she often slipped into her missives. Never eager to distribute her verse beyond her near circle, she refused publication offers; only a few of her 1,775 poems were printed in magazines before her demise.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a British subject in 1927. The acclaimed poet of Prufrock and Other Poems (1917) The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1936-1942), and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1930), among numerous other poems, critical essays, and plays won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.