April may be the cruelest month, at least according to T.S. Eliot, but it's also National Poetry Month, which celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in our culture. This month we take a look at the poets who have made Virginia their home or the subject of their work. From the earliest days of the Virginia colony to pathbreaking poets of the twentieth century, meet the bards who have left their mark on the Commonwealth in verse.
Robert Bolling, a member of the House of Burgesses, was the most prolific poet in colonial Virginia. His best-known poem is the amazingly grotesque poem “Neanthe” (ca. 1763), which reflected elements of Italian traditions, colonial Virginia folklore, and English poetry. His poem "Elegy," printed in May 1775 on the front page of the Virginia Gazette (Dixon & Hunter), commemorates the Virginia militiamen who died at the Battle of Point Pleasant during Dunmore's War in October 1774 just prior to the start of the American Revolutionary War.
Edgar Allan Poe wasn't born in Virginia, but he haunted Richmond for much of his short life like one of the characters of his famously macabre poems, dying under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore on his way to return to the city. His best-known poem, “The Raven” (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry— “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger, Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty,
but he also amassed more than his share of literary enemies.
The Southern Literary Messenger was one of the most successful and influential literary magazines in the South. It was edited for a time by Edgar Allan Poe, who greatly increased its circulation and prestige. It published many of the most prominent antebellum southern authors, but as the Civil War approached it veered toward defenses of slavery and polemics against abolitionism, eventually becoming a propagandistic organ of southern seccessionism.
D. Webster Davis was born into slavery shortly after the start of the Civil War. After emancipation, he moved with his mother to Richmond, where he graduated with honors from the Richmond Colored Normal School. Davis helped organize the Garrison Lyceum, a literary society, and served as its president. He began teaching at the Navy Hill School in 1879. He published his first book of poetry, Idle Moments, Containing Emancipation and Other Poems, in 1895. His poems expressed
the ambivalence of an educated, ambitious younger generation about the lives and thinking of their less-educated elders.
Anne Spencer was a poet, civil rights activist, teacher, and librarian. While fewer than thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the Black literary movement of the 1920s—the Harlem Renaissance—and only the second African American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). She was also an avid gardener and hosted a salon at her Lynchburg garden cottage, which she called Edankraal, that attracted many major African American writers and artists.
Ruby Altizer Roberts authored two collections of poetry: Forever Is Too Long (1946) and Command the Stars (1948). The shifting of seasons and the passage of time, as well as the natural beauty of southwestern Virginia, are themes of her poems, which appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She was also the long-time editor of The Lyric, the oldest journal of traditional poetry in North America. She was named Virginia’s first female poet laureate in 1950 and, until 1994, was the only woman to have held the post.
Check out this poetry reading from our 2024 Virginia Festival of the Book, as three poets—Amy M. Alvarez, Cynthia Manick, and January O’Neil—celebrate Black womanhood, weaving joy and elegy together in their verse.
