biography poets

Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 242 pages. The Arab poet's story, from her childhood in Nablus, on the West Bank of the Jordan, between the world wars to the occupation by the Israelis in 1967. A rare glimpse of Arab culture from a woman's perspective. Includes a selection of her poetry. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 594 pages. A landmark in postwar American literary criticism, forty-one extended essays on contemporary poets, including Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, and James Merrill. Blending biography, textual analysis, and philosophical reflection, it defined a generation's poetic discourse. The book stands as both a map of mid-century American verse and a statement of Howard's erudite critical voice. Light shelfwear, fraying to top, bottom of dust jacket spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 259 pages. When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 367 pages. (previously published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1966). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Leicester UK, Edmund Ward, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 263 pages. The first attempt to view Andrew Lang's work as a whole, and to attempt some account of the man himself. In specialized fields of scholarship Lang has always held his own; but as a literary figure he has been sadly neglected. Yet the late Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch ranked his style above that of Pater and Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame, and George Saintsbury considered him as among the chief minor poets of his period. As poet and essayist, and also as writer of tales and fairy stories, Andrew Lang at last gets his due in this study. Color frontis. portrait. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Rosa, Black Sparrow Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 341 pages, Hardcover with no dust jacket. SIGNED BY CREELEY, numbered 125 of 150 signed hardcovers. Tight copy with light edgewear to cover boards.

Hardcover. Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans Publishing , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 199 pages. A brief account of Williams' life and examination of his early poems, the criticism, biographies and plays, the novels, the Arthurian poems and his theological writings. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 213 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 589 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom text block. Tight copy. Light rubbing to dust jacket.

Softcover. NY, Grove Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 239 pages. Hettie Jones presents an intimate memoir of her life--from her middle-class Jewish family in Queens to her marriage to the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones and her search for her own artistic voice. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 332 pages. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket with slight crease to rear cover, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1898, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 303 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout (plates). Tissue guard on frontispiece. Deckled edges. Boards bound in dark green, gilt title on spine and front cover with decoration. Top edge gilt. Edges and pages have some tanning. Binding tight. Spine slightly frayed at top and bottom. Clean inside. Beautiful old book.

Softcover. Durango CO, Logbridge-Rhodes, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 150 pages, b&w illustrations. Poems by Wright, with letters, interviews, memoirs, elegies, a chronology, and bibliography. Light fade to spine, otherwise clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages. An intimate account of the sudden rise to literary fame and long, inexorable decline of Delmore Schwartz, a complex and deeply troubled man who was keenly aware of his own inner contradictions, as revealed by his correspondence. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Edward Moxon, 1st, 1849, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Three hardcovers bound in polished calf, gilt rules to covers, black leather labels on spine with orate gilt decorations. Pages: xx+480+viii+464+viii+460, appendix, index. Marbled endpapers and text edges. Aside from previous owner's bookplate on inside cover of each volume, a bright, clean set. Biography of the Scottish poet, incorporating many of his letters.

Softcover. Boston, David R. Godine / Pocket Paragon, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, b&w illustrations. Introduction and notes by Peter Moriarty. Lotte Jacobi was the fourth generation of her family to seize a camera to earn a living. She was drawn to artists and writers, musicians, poets and scientists. 95 pages.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this compelling new study of one of the century's most memorable poets, Jon Stallworthy has produced an outstanding full-scale biography of Louis MacNeice, drawing on the testimony of family, friends, lovers, and MacNeice's extensive unpublished correspondence and papers. Stallworthy, whose Wilfred Owen was described by Graham Greene as "one of the finest biographies of our time," has produced another no less remarkable life of an equally haunting figure. MacNeice's mother died when he was seven and Stallworthy shows how his imagination transmuted her ghostly presence, and the powerful presence of his father, into an elemental opposition structuring most of what he would write - from anguished indictments of his native Ireland to poignant love poems.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 497 pages. "The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." -Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 422 pages. Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians -- along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the 'art of losing' that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem 'One Art' --perhaps her most famous-- was linked in equal part to an 'art of finding,' Like new.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. No artist looms so large in Western consciousness and culture as Michelangelo Buonarroti, the most celebrated sculptor of all time. And no place on earth provides a stone so capable of simulating the warmth and vitality of human flesh and incarnating the genius of a Michelangelo as the statuario of Carrara, the storied marble mecca at Tuscany's northwest corner. It was there, where shadowy Etruscans and Roman slaves once toiled, that Michelangelo risked his life in dozens of harrowing expeditions to secure the precious stone for his Pieta, Moses, and other masterpieces. Many books have recounted Michelangelo's achievements in Florence and Rome. Michelangelo's Mountain goes beyond all of them, revealing his escapades and ordeals in the spectacular landscape that was the third pole of his tumultuous career and the third wellspring of his art. Eric Scigliano brings this haunting place and eternally fascinating artist to life in a sweeping tale peopled by popes and poets, mad dukes and mythic monsters, scheming courtiers and rough-hewn quarrymen. In showing how the artist, land, and stone transformed one another, Scigliano brings fresh insight to Michelangelo's most cherished works and illuminates his struggles with the princes and potentates of Carrara, Rome, and Medici Florence, who raised intrigue to a high art.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Chilton Book Company, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 383 pages. Hardcover. 8 pages of black & white photographs. Foxing to top edge. Light wear to dust jacket edges. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, The Winchell Co., 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 297 pages, b&w illustrations, in a bright dust jacket. Clean. Helene Iswolsky, daughter of a Russian diplomat, grew up in Japan, Denmark, Russia, and France. In 1911, her father became Russian ambassador to France. She returned to Russia for her debut in 1914, to be presented to the Tsarina Alexandra. While there she attended the wedding of Prince Felix Yusupov, who was to murder Rasputin three years later. After the Tsar was overthrown, her father retired to Biarritz and died there in 1919, leaving unpaid debts. The author took up translating and writing. She had a religious awakening and became a Catholic. A sojourn in a Benedictine monastery left her changed, but she decided not to make the cloister her life. The author knew many notable people in the Paris area, especially writers, poets, critics, philosophers of the "new wave," Christian humanists, and Russian emigres. She attended the Sunday afternoon gatherings of Jacques Maritain and Nicholas Berdiaev, and worked on Emmanuel Mounier's journal "Esprit." When the Nazis occupied France, she escaped to America with her mother. Here she founded an ecumenical movement called "The Third Hour" and taught Russian at Fordham University and other schools. She was a close friend of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Scarce.