We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line. ~ Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes overcame the censorship and blacklisting that plagued many of America’s African-American authors in the pre-Civil Rights era to become not only the voice of his generation, but [...]

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own. ~ Thomas Hardy
A failed novelist turned poet, Thomas Hardy could be called a writer’s writer, his novels and verses read more by other writers than by the public, especially during his lifetime, when the [...]

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
“I have a [...]

During the mid-twentieth century, there was no poet more beloved in the United States than Robert Frost. Considered the unofficial poet laureate of the nation, Frost’s poems were more widely read than almost any other poet’s work, his poetry was part of every English course in America’s curriculum, and not surprisingly, his poetry was [...]

Poet, essayist, Transcendentalist and American literary giant, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry is still taught as assiduously in the 21st Century as it was during the 19th Century.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. The son of a Unitarian minister who died when he was eight years of age, Ralph Waldo Emerson began [...]