American Poetry?

Question

I have to do a project on an poem by an american poet. I do not yet know what poet to have my project on. I am asking for a reccomendation on an american poet. I prefer a relatively famous author but avoid cliches.

Answer 1

Go for Walt Whitman. He is the foremost of American poet to date. He contains multitudes just like America does. You'll have plenty to say about him and his great works. No other poet envisioned in USA in art and creative imagination as did Whitman.

Start from here:

A story of Whitman's later years, told by a publisher, reveals that the author did not lose his self-esteem during his last years. Whitman had entered with his ruffled beard and sombrero the lobby of the Hotel Albert in New York and every man in it raised his newspaper to hide his face from the author. He turned and went out. The publisher, for some reason, followed him and asked who he was. The man said: "I am Walt Whitman. If you'll lend me a dollar, you will be helping immortality to stumble on." (from The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford, 1938) Jorge Luis Borges has seen Whitman as the hero of his epic, a character he yearned to be: "Thus, on one page of the work, Whitman is born on Long Island; on others, in the South. Thus, in one of the mostly authentic sections of "Song of Myself," he relates a heroic episode of the Mexican War and says he heard the story told in Texas, a place he never went." (from The Total Library, 1999)

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wwhitman.htm

good luck
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Answer 2

Well, what's the project? There's no shortage of American poets.

Some names: W.S. Merwin, Wendell Berry, Philip Levine, Stanley Kunitz, Sharon Olds, Margaret Piercy, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alan Ginsberg, etc. etc.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/index.html Now go off and read