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William Saphier was a Romanian-born poet and painter who served as associate editor for Others, a monthly modernist magazine he coedited with Alfred Kreymborg. Other members of the editorial staff included Maxwell Bodenheim, Helen Hoyt, Lola Ridge, and William Carlos Williams. The magazine, under Saphier and Kreymborg, published the early poetry of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Williams, among others.
One of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, Robert Frost was the author of numerous poetry collections, including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923). Born in San Francisco in 1874, he lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont. He died in Boston in 1963.
Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900.
Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania in 1874. An important figure among American expatriates in Paris, she was known for her experimental literature, including Tender Buttons (Claire Marie, 1914). She died in France in 1946.
W. H. Auden was admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; his incorporation of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech in his work; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information.
