Author: Gary Sloan

An obscure New England farmer and teacher until his first book of verse, A Boy’s Will, was published in 1913, Robert Frost (1874–1963) died an international celebrity. He garnered four Pulitzer Prizes and was awarded forty-four honorary degrees. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and other anthology …

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was a literary prodigy. As a nineteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, he drafted the seminal novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. This gritty, unsentimental portrait of Bowery lowlifes initiated modern American fiction. It was the first native specimen of literary naturalism. Crane said of the novel: “I tried to make plain …

That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them—is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan. —Letter to Catherine Sweetser, 1878 When Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) died, she was virtually unknown to the public. Only seven of her poems had been published, a few without permission, and they attracted little …

Though in his lifetime his poetry was seldom praised, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is now ensconced in the pantheon of English poets. His “Ode to the West Wind,” “Ozymandias,” “To a Skylark,” “The Cloud,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” “Adonais,” and “Prometheus Unbound” are entrenched in anthologies of literature and studied throughout the world. …

Though his poetry comprises but four slender volumes—A Shropshire Lad (ASL), Last Poems, More Poems (MP), and Additional Poems (AP), the last two published posthumously—Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) belongs in the pantheon of English poets. Born in Worcestershire, in the environs of the Shropshire hills, Housman liked to amble through highland, field, and dale. As …

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), was once the most celebrated poet in Europe. Handsome and charismatic, he was the darling of polite society, the cynosure of salons, a pacesetter in fashion and mannerism, the observed of all observers. Smitten debutantes, madams, and maidservants vied for the attention of the dashing peer of the realm. …

Long ago in the Protestant hinterlands of northeast Texas, four young infidels consecrated their bibulous souls to an eleventh-century Persian astronomer-poet. Each Satur day night, in an old Studebaker, we made a pilgrimage to Hugo, Oklahoma, the nearest wet town, to procure libations of Thunderbird wine. As we meandered homeward on isolated back roads, we …