The Poets’ Corner

c.630–570 BC · Lesbos, Greece

Archaic Greek lyric poet of Lesbos, revered in antiquity as "the Tenth Muse". Though most of her work survives only in fragments, her intimate, first-person poems of love and longing invented a voice of personal feeling that Western poetry has drawn from ever since.

1830–1886 · United States

American poet who published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime and left nearly eighteen hundred behind — hand-stitched into little booklets in a bedroom in Amherst. Working in deliberate privacy, she compressed mortality, doubt, ecstasy, and grammar itself into slant-rhymed lines that changed poetry after her death. She chose the small room and made it infinite.

c.1753–1784 · West Africa & America

Kidnapped from West Africa as a child and enslaved in Boston, she mastered English, Latin, and the classics within years — and at about twenty became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. Doubted so thoroughly that eighteen of Boston’s leading men examined her to certify she could have written it, she answered with verse that reached General Washington and readers across two continents.

1207–1273 · Persia

Persian poet, scholar, and Sufi mystic whose verse — the Masnavi and thousands of lyric poems — is among the most beloved and widely read in the world. His work fuses spiritual longing, love, and the search for unity into imagery that crosses every culture.

1928–2014 · United States

Poet, memoirist, and civil rights voice whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings transformed American literature, and whose life spanned trauma, silence, stages, and presidential inaugurations.