biography meaning poetry

What Is Biography? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Biography definition.

A  biography  (BYE-og-ruh-fee) is a written account of one person’s life authored by another person. A biography includes all pertinent details from the subject’s life, typically arranged in a chronological order. The word  biography  stems from the Latin  biographia , which succinctly explains the word’s definition:  bios  = “life” +  graphia  = “write.”

Since the advent of the written word, historical writings have offered information about real people, but it wasn’t until the 18th century that biographies evolved into a separate literary genre.  Autobiographies  and memoirs fall under the broader biography genre, but they are distinct literary forms due to one key factor: the subjects themselves write these works. Biographies are popular source materials for documentaries, television shows, and motion pictures.

The History of Biographies

The biography form has its roots in Ancient Rome and Greece. In 44 BCE, Roman writer Cornelius Nepos published  Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae  ( Lives of the Generals ), one of the earliest recorded biographies. In 80 CE, Greek writer Plutarch released  Parallel Lives , a sweeping work consisting of 48 biographies of famous men. In 121 CE, Roman historian Suetonius wrote  De vita Caesarum  ( On the Lives of the Caesars ), a series of 12 biographies detailing the lives of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors of the Roman Empire. These were among the most widely read biographies of their time, and at least portions of them have survived intact over the millennia.

During the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church had a notable influence on biographies. Historical, political, and cultural biographies fell out of favor. Biographies of religious figures—including saints, popes, and church founders—replaced them. One notable exception was Italian painter/architect Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 biography,  The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , which was immensely popular. In fact, it is one of the first examples of a bestselling book.

Still, it wasn’t until the 18th century that authors began to abandon multiple subjects in a single work and instead focus their research and writing on one subject. Scholars consider James Boswell’s 1791  The Life of Samuel Johnson  to be the first modern biography. From here, biographies were established as a distinct literary genre, separate from more general historical writing.

As understanding of psychology and sociology grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries, biographies further evolved, offering up even more comprehensive pictures of their subjects. Authors who played major roles in this contemporary approach to biographing include Lytton Strachey, Gamaliel Bradford, and Robert Graves.

Types of Biographies

While all biographical works chronicle the lives of real people, writers can present the information in several different ways.

• Popular biographies are life histories written for a general readership.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks  by Rebecca Skloot and  Into the Wild  by Jon Krakauer are two popular examples.
• Critical biographies discuss the relationship between the subject’s life and the work they produced or were involved in; for example,  The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune  by Conor O’Clery and  Unpresidented: A Biography of Donald Trump  by Martha Brockenbrough.
• Historical biographies put greater understanding on how the subject’s life and contributions affected or were affected by the times in which they lived; see  John Adams  by David McCullough and  Catherine the Great  by Peter K. Massie.
• Literary biographies concentrate almost exclusively on writers and artists, blending a conventional  narrative  of the historical facts of the subject’s life with an exploration of how these facts impacted their creative output. Some examples include  Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay  by Nancy Milford and  Jackson Pollock: An American Saga  by Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh.
• Reference biographies are more scholarly writings, usually written by multiple authors and covering multiple lives around a single topic. They verify facts, provide background details, and contribute supplemental information resources, like bibliographies, glossaries, and historical documents; for example,  Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007  and the  Dictionary of Canadian Biography .
• Fictional biographies, or biographical novels, like  The Other Boleyn Girl  by Philippa Gregory, incorporate creative license into the retelling of a real person’s story by taking on the structure and freedoms of a novel. The term can also describe novels in which authors give an abundance of background information on their characters, to the extent that the novel reads more like a biography than fiction. An example of this is George R.R. Martin’s  Fire and Blood , a novel detailing the history of a royal family from his popular  A Song of Ice and Fire

Biographies and Filmed Entertainment

Movie makers and television creators frequently produce biographical stories, either as dramatized productions based on real people or as nonfiction accounts.

Documentary

This genre is a nonfictional movie or television show that uses historical records to tell the story of a subject. The subject might be a one person or a group of people, or it might be a certain topic or theme. To present a biography in a visually compelling way, documentaries utilize archival footage, recreations, and interviews with subjects, scholars, experts, and others associated with the subject.

Famous film documentaries include  Grey Gardens,  a biography of two of Jacqueline Kennedy’s once-wealthy cousins, who, at the time of filming, lived in squalor in a condemned mansion in the Hamptons; and  I Am Not Your Negro , a biography of the life and legacy of pioneering American author James Baldwin.

Television documentary series tell one story over the course of several episodes, like  The Jinx :  The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst , a biography of the real estate heir and alleged serial killer that focused on his suspected crimes. There are many nonfiction television shows that use a documentary format, but subjects typically change from one episode to the next, such as A&E’s  Biography  and PBS’s  POV .

These films are biographical motion pictures, written by screenwriters and performed by actors. They often employ a certain amount of creative liberty in their interpretation of a real life. This is largely done to maintain a feasible runtime; capturing all of the pivotal moments of a subject’s life in a 90- or 120-minute movie is all but impossible. So, filmmakers might choose to add, eliminate, or combine key events and characters, or they may focus primarily on one or only a few aspects of the subject’s life. Some popular examples:  Coal Miner’s Daughter , a biography of country music legend Loretta Lynn;  Malcom X , a biopic centered on the civil rights leader of the same name; and  The King’s Speech , a dramatization of Prince Albert’s efforts to overcome a stutter and ascend the English throne.

Semi-fictionalized account

This approach takes a real-life event and interprets or expands it in ways that stray beyond what actually happened. This is done for entertainment and to build the story so it fits the filmmaker’s vision or evolves into a longer form, such as a multi-season television show. These accounts sometimes come with the disclaimer that they are “inspired by true events.” Examples of semi-fictionalized accounts are the TV series  Orange Is the New Black ,  Masters of Sex , and  Mozart of the Jungle —each of which stem from at least one biographical element, but showrunners expounded upon to provide many seasons of entertainment.

The Functions of Biography

Biographies inform readers about the life of a notable person. They are a way to introduce readers to the work’s subject—the historical details, the subject’s motivations and psychological underpinnings, and their environment and the impact they had, both in the short and long term.

Because the author is somewhat removed from their subject, they can offer a more omniscient, third-person narrative account. This vantage point allows the author to put certain events into a larger context; compare and contrast events, people, and behaviors predominant in the subject’s life; and delve into psychological and sociological themes of which the subject may not have been aware.

Also, a writer structures a biography to make the life of the subject interesting and readable. Most biographers want to entertain as well as inform, so they typically use a traditional  plot  structure—an introduction,  conflict , rising of tension, a climax, a resolution, and an ending—to give the life story a narrative shape. While the ebb and flow of life is a normal day-to-day rhythm, it doesn’t necessarily make for entertaining reading. The job of the writer, then, becomes one of shaping the life to fit the elements of a good plot.

Writers Known for Biographies

Many modern writers have dedicated much of their careers to biographies, such as:

• Kitty Kelley, author of  Jackie Oh! An Intimate Biography; His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra ; and  The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
• Antonia Fraser, author of  Mary Queen of Scots ;  Cromwell; Our Chief of Men ; and  The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605
• David McCullough, author of  The Path Between the Seas; Truman ; and  John Adams
• Andrew Morton, author of  Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words; Madonna ; and  Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography
• Alison Weir, author of  The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Eleanor of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God; Queen of England ; and  Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess

Examples of Biographies

1. James Boswell,  The Life of Samuel Johnson

The biography that ushered in the modern era of true-life writing,  The Life of Samuel Johnson  covered the entirety of its subject’s life, from his birth to his status as England’s preeminent writer to his death. Boswell was a personal acquaintance of Johnson, so he was able to draw on voluminous amounts of personal conversations the two shared.

What also sets this biography apart is, because Boswell was a contemporary of Johnson, readers see Johnson in the context of his own time. He wasn’t some fabled figure that a biographer was writing about centuries later; he was someone to whom the author had access, and Boswell could see the real-world influence his subject had on life in the here and now.

2. Sylvia Nasar,  A Beautiful Mind

Nasar’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of mathematician John Nash introduced legions of readers to Nash’s remarkable life and genius. The book opens with Nash’s childhood and follows him through his education, career, personal life, and struggles with schizophrenia. It ends with his acceptance of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics. In addition to a Pulitzer nomination,  A Beautiful Mind  won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, was a  New York Times  bestseller, and provided the basis for the Academy Award-winning 2001 film of the same name.

3. Catherine Clinton,  Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom

Clinton’s biography of the abolitionist icon is a large-scale epic that chronicles Tubman’s singular life. It starts at her birth in the 1820s as the slave Araminta Ross, continuing through her journey to freedom; her pivotal role in the Underground Railroad; her Moses-like persona; and her death in 1913.

Because Tubman could not read or write, she left behind no letters, diaries, or other personal papers in her own hand and voice. Clinton reconstructed Tubman’s history entirely through other source material, and historians often cite this work as the quintessential biography of Tubman’s life.

4. Megan Mayhew Bergman,  Almost Famous Women

Almost Famous Women  is not a biography in the strictest sense of the word; it is a fictional interpretation of real-life women. Each short story revolves around a woman from history with close ties to fame, such as movie star Marlene Dietrich, Standard Oil heiress Marion “Joe” Carstairs, aviatrix Beryl Markham, Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly, and Lord Byron’s daughter Allegra. Mayhew Bergman imagines these colorful women in equally colorful episodes that put them in a new light—a light that perhaps offers them the honor and homage that history denied them.

Further Resources on Biography

Newsweek  compiled their picks for the  75 Best Biographies of All Time .

The Open Education Database has a list of  75 Biographies to Read Before You Die .

Goodreads put together a list of readers’  best biography selections .

If you’re looking to write biographies,  Infoplease  has instructions for writing shorter pieces, while  The Writer   has practical advice for writing manuscript-length bios.

Ranker  collected  a comprehensive list of famous biographers .

Related Terms

• Autobiography
• Short Story

Definition of Biography

A biography is the non- fiction , written history or account of a person’s life. Biographies are intended to give an objective portrayal of a person, written in the third person. Biographers collect information from the subject (if he/she is available), acquaintances of the subject, or in researching other sources such as reference material, experts, records, diaries, interviews, etc. Most biographers intend to present the life story of a person and establish the context of their story for the reader, whether in terms of history and/or the present day. In turn, the reader can be reasonably assured that the information presented about the biographical subject is as true and authentic as possible.

Biographies can be written about a person at any time, no matter if they are living or dead. However, there are limitations to biography as a literary device. Even if the subject is involved in the biographical process, the biographer is restricted in terms of access to the subject’s thoughts or feelings.

Biographical works typically include details of significant events that shape the life of the subject as well as information about their childhood, education, career, and relationships. Occasionally, a biography is made into another form of art such as a film or dramatic production. The musical production of “Hamilton” is an excellent example of a biographical work that has been turned into one of the most popular musical productions in Broadway history.

Common Examples of Biographical Subjects

Most people assume that the subject of a biography must be a person who is famous in some way. However, that’s not always the case. In general, biographical subjects tend to be interesting people who have pioneered something in their field of expertise or done something extraordinary for humanity. In addition, biographical subjects can be people who have experienced something unusual or heartbreaking, committed terrible acts, or who are especially gifted and/or talented.

As a literary device, biography is important because it allows readers to learn about someone’s story and history. This can be enlightening, inspiring, and meaningful in creating connections. Here are some common examples of biographical subjects:

• political leaders
• entrepreneurs
• historical figures
• serial killers
• notorious people
• political activists
• adventurers/explorers
• religious leaders
• military leaders
• cultural figures

Famous Examples of Biographical Works

The readership for biography tends to be those who enjoy learning about a certain person’s life or overall field related to the person. In addition, some readers enjoy the literary form of biography independent of the subject. Some biographical works become well-known due to either the person’s story or the way the work is written, gaining a readership of people who may not otherwise choose to read biography or are unfamiliar with its form.

Here are some famous examples of biographical works that are familiar to many readers outside of biography fans:

• Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Caroline Fraser)
• Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
• Churchill: A Life (Martin Gilbert)
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Simon Winchester)
• A Beautiful Mind (Sylvia Nasar)
• The Black Rose (Tananarive Due)
• John Adams (David McCullough)
• Into the Wild ( Jon Krakauer )
• John Brown (W.E.B. Du Bois)
• Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Hayden Herrera)
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin)
• Shirley Jackson : A Rather Haunted Life ( Ruth Franklin)
• the stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit (Michael Finkel)

Difference Between Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir

Biography, autobiography , and memoir are the three main forms used to tell the story of a person’s life. Though there are similarities between these forms, they have distinct differences in terms of the writing, style , and purpose.

A biography is an informational narrative and account of the life history of an individual person, written by someone who is not the subject of the biography. An autobiography is the story of an individual’s life, written by that individual. In general, an autobiography is presented chronologically with a focus on key events in the person’s life. Since the writer is the subject of an autobiography, it’s written in the first person and considered more subjective than objective, like a biography. In addition, autobiographies are often written late in the person’s life to present their life experiences, challenges, achievements, viewpoints, etc., across time.

Memoir refers to a written collection of a person’s significant memories, written by that person. Memoir doesn’t generally include biographical information or chronological events unless it’s relevant to the story being presented. The purpose of memoir is reflection and an intention to share a meaningful story as a means of creating an emotional connection with the reader. Memoirs are often presented in a narrative style that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Examples of Biography in Literature

An important subset of biography is literary biography. A literary biography applies biographical study and form to the lives of artists and writers. This poses some complications for writers of literary biographies in that they must balance the representation of the biographical subject, the artist or writer, as well as aspects of the subject’s literary works. This balance can be difficult to achieve in terms of judicious interpretation of biographical elements within an author’s literary work and consideration of the separate spheres of the artist and their art.

Literary biographies of artists and writers are among some of the most interesting biographical works. These biographies can also be very influential for readers, not only in terms of understanding the artist or writer’s personal story but the context of their work or literature as well. Here are some examples of well-known literary biographies:

Example 1:  Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay  (Nancy Milford)

One of the first things Vincent explained to Norma was that there was a certain freedom of language in the Village that mustn’t shock her. It wasn’t vulgar. ‘So we sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, . Needle out, piss. Needle in, . Needle out, c. Until we were easy with the words.’

This passage reflects the way in which Milford is able to characterize St. Vincent Millay as a person interacting with her sister. Even avid readers of a writer’s work are often unaware of the artist’s private and personal natures, separate from their literature and art. Milford reflects the balance required on the part of a literary biographer of telling the writer’s life story without undermining or interfering with the meaning and understanding of the literature produced by the writer. Though biographical information can provide some influence and context for a writer’s literary subjects, style, and choices , there is a distinction between the fictional world created by a writer and the writer’s “real” world. However, a literary biographer can illuminate the writer’s story so that the reader of both the biography and the biographical subject’s literature finds greater meaning and significance.

Example 2:  The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens  (Claire Tomalin)

The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.

Tomalin’s literary biography of Charles Dickens reveals the writer’s extramarital relationship with a woman named Nelly Ternan. Tomalin presents the complications that resulted for Dickens from this relationship in terms of his personal and family life as well as his professional writing and literary work. Revealing information such as an extramarital relationship can influence the way a reader may feel about the subject as a person, and in the case of literary biography it can influence the way readers feel about the subject’s literature as well. Artists and writers who are beloved , such as Charles Dickens, are often idealized by their devoted readers and society itself. However, as Tomalin’s biography of Dickens indicates, artists and writers are complicated and as subject to human failings as anyone else.

Example 3:  Virginia Woolf  (Hermione Lee)

‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’: so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don’t stay still, so life-writing can’t be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going ‘ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere , detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. So, ‘There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation’. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story.

In this passage, Lee is able to demonstrate what her biographical subject, Virginia Woolf, felt about biography and a person telling their own or another person’s story. Literary biographies of well-known writers can be especially difficult to navigate in that both the author and biographical subject are writers, but completely separate and different people. As referenced in this passage by Lee, Woolf was aware of the subtleties and fluidity present in a person’s life which can be difficult to judiciously and effectively relay to a reader on the part of a biographer. In addition, Woolf offers insight into the fact that biographers must make choices in terms of what information is presented to the reader and the context in which it is offered, making them a “miner’s canary” as to how history will view and remember the biographical subject.

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How to Teach Your Students to Write Biography Poems

Students can tell their stories in a playful way

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• B.A., Sociology, University of California Los Angeles

Biography poems, or Bio poems, are a quick and easy way for young students to learn poetry . They allow students to express their personality and introduce themselves to others, making them a perfect activity for the first day of school. Bio poems can also be used to describe someone else, making them perfect for history lessons or other subjects where students might be studying key historical figures. You will see in the examples below that students can research someone like Rosa Parks , then create a Bio poem on her.

What Are Bio Poems?

Below, you can read three examples of Bio Poems. One is about a teacher, one is about a student, and one is about a famous person that students researched.

Sample Bio Poem of a Teacher

Kind, funny, hard-working, loving

Sister of Amy

Lover of Computers, Friends, and Harry Potter books

Who feels excited on the first day of school, sad when she watches the news, and happy to open a new book

Who needs people, books, and computers

Who gives help to students, smiles to her husband, and letters to family and friends

Who fears war, hunger, and bad days

Who would like to visit the pyramids in Egypt , teach the world’s greatest third graders, and read on the beach in Hawaii

Resident of California

Sample Bio Poem of a Student

Athletic, strong, determined, fast

Son of Janelle and Nathan and brother to Reesa

Loves the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, sports, and Baked Beans

Who feels happy when playing with friends, and happy when playing sports and being with his family

Who needs books, family, and Legos to by happy in life

Who makes people laugh when someone is sad, who likes to gives smiles, and loves hugging

Fears the dark, spiders, clowns

Would like to visit Paris, France

Resident of Buffalo

Sample Bio Poem of a Person Researched

Determined, Brave, Strong, Caring

Wife of Raymond Parks, and mother of her children

Who loved freedom, education, and equality

Who loved to stand up for her beliefs, loved to help others, disliked discrimination

Who feared racism would never end, who feared she wouldn't be able to make a difference, who feared she wouldn't have enough courage to fight

Who changed history by standing up to others and making a difference in equality

Who wanted to see an end to discrimination, a world that was equal, and respect was given to all

Born in Alabama, and resident in Detroit

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English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Biography: A Literary Genre

The literary device of biography involves the meticulous construction of a narrative that captures the essence of an individual’s life through various literary techniques.

Etymology of Biography

Table of Contents

The term, biography, originates from the combination of two ancient Greek words: bios meaning “life” and graphein meaning “to write.” The word first appeared in the English language in the late 17th century, derived from the French word biographie. Its etymology reflects the essence of the genre , which involves the written account or narrative of an individual’s life.

Meanings of Biography

Biography has different meanings in different contexts. Here are some possible meanings.

• Written Account: Refers to a written account or narrative of a person’s life, detailing their experiences, achievements, and challenges.
• Comprehensive Exploration: Involves a comprehensive exploration of an individual’s personal and professional journey , offering insights into their character, motivations, and societal impact.
• Literary Genre: Describes the genre of literature or non-fiction writing that focuses on writing biographical accounts.
• Broader Scope: Can encompass any detailed study or examination of a person’s life, including audiovisual presentations, documentaries, or oral histories.
• Figurative Usage: Used metaphorically to describe the compilation or documentation of information about non-human entities, such as the biography of a company or an animal species, providing an understanding of their origins, development, and significance.

Definition of Literary Device of Biography

The literary device of biography involves the meticulous construction of a narrative that captures the essence of an individual’s life through various literary techniques. It uses characterization to portray the subject’s personality, motivations, and inner conflicts. It utilizes techniques such as direct and indirect characterization, dialogue, and anecdotal evidence.

Types of Biograph ies

Please note that these are general descriptions, and there may be some overlap or variations within each type of biography.

Literary Examples of Biographies

These biographies provide unique insights into the lives, experiences, and contributions of the individuals they feature, shedding light on historical events, social issues, and the complexities of human existence.

Suggested Readings about Biographies

• A xelrod, Alan, and Charles R. Cooper. The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing Biography . Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
• Le, Hermoine. Biography: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography . University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
• Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives . University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
• Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre . Yale University Press, 1980.

Related posts:

• Onomatopoeia: A Literary Device

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10 of the Best Poems about Life and Living

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

For Matthew Arnold, ‘Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.’ But Ezra Pound responded that ‘Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.’ Whether poetry is a ‘criticism’ of life, poems about life itself – about the business of living, about what it means to live a full life, and about what ‘lived experience’ might be – abound.

Here are ten of the greatest poems about life and living.

1. Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘What Is This Life’.

Raleigh (c. 1552-1618) is credited with many things: introducing tobacco and potatoes to England (neither of which he did), laying down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth I (a later myth), and writing courtly poetry.

Only the last of these has any truth, and between his various travels to the New World, Raleigh penned this short poem in which he wonders what life is all about:

What is our life? A play of passion; Our mirth the music of division; Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be, Where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss; Our graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest – that’s no jest.

2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘ A Psalm of Life ’.

Let’s continue this pick of classic poems about life with one of Longfellow’s most famous, not least because of the memorable line about ‘footprints on the sands of time’. This poem has been popular at funerals in particular, suggesting as it does that we can make our mark on the world before we leave it.

3. Whitman, ‘ O Me! O Life! ’.

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d …

One of the shortest poems on this list, this poem was memorably featured in Dead Poets Society : Robin Williams’s character recites it to his class. It contains many of the features of Walt Whitman’s greatest poetry: the free verse rhythm, the alternation between long and short lines, the rhetorical (or not-so-rhetorical?) questions, the focus on the self.

4. Charlotte Brontë, ‘ Life ’.

Life, believe, is not a dream So dark as sages say; Oft a little morning rain Foretells a pleasant day.

So begins this poem from Charlotte Brontë (1816-55), the eldest of the three famous Brontë sisters, which offers an update take on life: after acknowledging the hardships present so often in people’s lives, the poet asserts that life is not so bad as all that.

5. Emily Dickinson, ‘ Each Life Converges to some Centre ’.

This wonderful Emily Dickinson poem is another positive approach to life: every human life has a purpose, a goal, which we may ourselves be scarcely aware of – yet it nevertheless exists. It begins:

Each Life Converges to some Centre — Expressed — or still — Exists in every Human Nature A Goal  …

6. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Full Life’.

Let’s continue this pick of the greatest poems about life with a very short poem from the prolific poet, novelist, and short-story writer D. H. Lawrence. Indeed, this poem is so short it can be quoted in full here, as it simply reads: ‘A man can’t fully live unless he dies and ceases to care, ceases to care.’ Now there’s a paradox for you…

7. Philip Larkin, ‘ Dockery and Son ’.

Beginning with Larkin returning to Oxford to look round his old student digs in college, this poem sees the poet comparing his life with a contemporary of his, a man named Dockery whose son is now up at Oxford, while Larkin remains childless and unmarried.

The final stanza muses thoughtfully on what makes a good life. Whether we ‘use it’ or not, he concludes, it goes…

8. Anne Sexton, ‘ The Room of My Life ’.

Sexton (1928-74), who took her own life following a long battle with depression, is often eclipsed by her contemporary and fellow American poet, Sylvia Plath. But Sexton’s poetry is even more stark than Plath’s in confronting the harsh realities of her own life experiences.

Here, we get knives, eyeballs, ashtrays (to ‘cry into’), and other symbols of despair and pain, all inhabiting the ‘room’ that represents Sexton’s troubled life.

9. Maya Angelou, ‘ Life Doesn’t Frighten Me ’.

This is the title poem from Angelou’s 1993 collection Life Doesn’t Frighten Me , which was marketed as a children’s book although Angelou did not originally conceive the poems as being specifically for children.

A poem about overcoming fear and not allowing it to master you, ‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is a powerful declaration of self-belief and the importance of facing one’s fears. Angelou lists a number of things, from barking dogs to grotesque fairy tales in the Mother Goose tradition, but comes back to her mantra: ‘Life doesn’t frighten me at all’.

That said, there is a question mark hanging over precisely how the speaker of the poem has mastered her fear, and whether, in fact, she has fully succeeded. Is she trying to convince herself by repeating her mantra until she starts to believe it?

10. Sylvia Plath, ‘ A Life ’.

As we mentioned Plath above, we thought we’d conclude this pick of the greatest poems about life and living with one simply titled ‘A Life’. The poem is about death almost as much as it is about life, since it was probably at least partly inspired by Plath’s memories of her suicide attempt in the early 1950s, and subsequent stay in hospital; she wrote it in 1960.

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• Onkar Sharma

Literary Yard

Search for meaning

Significance, Meaning, and Purpose in Contemporary Biographical Poetry

By: Robert Levine

An interesting but often overlooked subspecies of narrative verse is biographical poetry, relating the life story of a real person; a well-read friend of mine told me he didn’t know such poetry existed. Robert Penn Warren pioneered biographical poetry with the book-length works Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé and Audubon: A Life , applying his equal mastery of fiction and poetry to spinning out his protagonists’ fortunes in verse. Biographical verse, of course, offers the poet the advantage of a ready-made plot. But the poet still must choose which incidents in the protagonist’s life to present and the light in which to cast them. One expects poetry to find a higher or larger significance in the life of its subject than can be gleaned from a prose biography, and it must start from this significance to know how it will tell its tale. A group of contemporary works of biographical poetry—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah , Andrew Hudgins’s After the Lost War , Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound , and Douglas Burnet Smith’s Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie —demonstrate similar approaches to theme and other elements of verse biography, each with its own variations, but their results share similar shortcomings.

Thomas and Beulah chronicles the lives and marriage of Dove’s maternal grandparents in two sections, the first focused on Thomas and the second on Beulah. The book begins with the young Thomas as an itinerant musician on a Mississippi riverboat. He is a self in transit: in the first two poems, we find no trace of the small town in Tennessee he has left, although it will appear in flashbacks later in Thomas’s section, nor any hint of the urban environment of Akron, Ohio where he will soon settle down, work a series of steady jobs, marry Beulah, and raise a family. He becomes something of a different person his new, sedentary life in the North, and his old footloose riverboat self fades into a dead part of him—“… the nights of chaw/and river-bright//had retreated, somehow,/into another’s life” (“Jiving”).

We see Beulah’s childhood in two poems, though like Thomas’s it recurs in memory in subsequent ones. Perhaps Dove portrays Beulah’s beginnings more transparently than Thomas’s because Beulah grows up in Akron, the locus of her life with Thomas; she never has his sense of displacement. The childhood poems also provide insight into the trait of Beulah’s that will make her marriage a challenge. She too is a free spirit, in thrall to the imagination, but with an admixture of ambition:

Practice makes perfect , the old folks said. So she rehearsed deception until ice cubes dangled willingly from a plain white string and she could change an egg into her last nickel.

…………………………………………………………

…. One night she awoke and on the lawn blazed a scaffolding strung in lights. Next morning the Sunday paper showed the Eiffel Tower soaring through clouds. It was a sign she would make it to Paris one day.

She only acquiesces to Thomas’s courtship because, in the attitude of the times, “she is getting on ”—in danger of ending up an old maid. She considers him something of a country bumpkin, and thinks as he plays his mandolin for her,

Cigar-box music! She’d much prefer a pianola and scent in a sky-colored flask. Not that scarf, bright as butter. Not his hands, cool as dimes.

(“Courtship, Diligence”)

Dove employs a similar structure in the two sections. Early on, the sections advance methodically through time, hitting the key events or stages in the narrative. By the middle of the sections, their movement meanders more; having arrived at the domestic relationship that will frame the rest of Thomas’s and Beulah’s lives, the narration slows down time to compile a panorama of what that frame contains. Thomas’s section fittingly lacks a sense of moving toward conclusion, reflecting the suddenness of his death by heart attack. We can see the end approaching in Beulah’s section less because an illness the book barely touches upon precedes her death than because “Wingfoot Lake,” the third-to-last poem, shows that her discomfort with the civil-rights generation’s assertiveness and reconception of identity means she has outlived her time:

Last August she stood alone for hours in front of the T.V. set as a crow’s wing moved slowly through the white streets of government. That brave swimming

scared her, like Joanna saying Mother, we’re Afro-Americans now! What did she know about Africa?

Dove characterizes Thomas and Beulah through a balance of action and reflection: we see what they do, and thanks to the book’s limited third-person narration from each spouse’s perspective within his or her section, we also hear what they think before, while, and after doing it. Others have noted the importance of motifs in Thomas and Beulah , and the motifs mainly contribute by telling us about the characters associated with them. Thomas’s mandolin symbolizes his roving riverboat life and the charm and mystique that being a wandering artist imparts to him (“Jiving” ends, “…. The young ladies/saying He sure plays // that tater bug / like the devil! //sighing their sighs/and dimpling.”). His straw hat that appears in a few early poems speaks to his rural background, his yellow scarf to his flashy and, to Beulah, gaudily gauche sense of style. The primary motif connected to Beulah, her pet canary—“that sun-bleached delicacy/in its house of sticks”—represents her feeling of insufficient outlet for her true self in her family life, although it can’t help seeming like an uninspired imitation of Maya Angelou (“Definition in the Face of Unnamed Fury”). Nonetheless, Thomas and Beulah ’s characterization feels somewhat impoverished. It would be unfair to call the title characters two-dimensional, but they are, as it were, foreshortened; this could simply be a result of Dove’s terse style, but she tells us so little about Thomas and Beulah as individuals aside from their relationship to each other that we easily suspect there is more to them that we’re not being shown.

Dove makes more than her fair share of thematic faux pas . Beulah’s section of the book beats the theme of her confinement in and dissatisfaction with her marriage to death without tweaking the theme in its repetition. Then, after mocking Thomas’s Southern country ways and resenting his undermining her housekeeping efforts for nearly her whole section of the book, Beulah tells Thomas on his deathbed, “ listen: we were good, / though we never believed it ” (“Company”). It might be human nature not to appreciate what we have until we lose or come close to losing it, but nothing in the book until this point prepares us for this change of heart, making it seem more a contrived act of pity on her dying spouse than a genuine emotional transformation. Most of Thomas and Beulah’s thematic non-sequiturs, though, occur on the local level—lines or phrases that have nothing to do with the situation or climate of their poem. “Straw Hat” declares that Thomas moved to Ohio when “he learned he wasn’t perfect, that/no one was perfect.” Most people learn that well before the age of twenty-one, when Thomas settled in Akron, and most people don’t change their domicile and lifestyle as a result. “Aurora Borealis” remarks of the Northern Lights as Thomas witnesses them, “What shines is a thought/Which has lost its way.” The reader has no idea what the thought is, how it has lost its way, or why it shines; this beautiful metaphor, as far as he or she can tell, is completely meaningless. Similarly, the reader will likely be mystified by why “Recovery” describes Beulah as “obedient” and why she dreams about salt in “Nightmare.”

Dove commits a few narrative gaffes as well, despite the care she takes with narrative structure and development. Without the chronology of her grandparents’ lives appended at the end of the book, the reader could easily assume that Thomas travels to Ohio intentionally when we meet him on the riverboat at the book’s beginning, when in fact he drifts up and down the Mississippi for two years before settling in Akron. The poem before Thomas’s death, “The Satisfaction Coal Company,” takes place almost thirty years before he dies; no reason presents itself for this only full-poem violation of both sections’ forward chronological progress. Moreover, one wonders how Thomas reacts internally to his introduction to the urban North. Dove tells us that he arrives “in Akron, Ohio/1921, on the dingy beach of a man-made lake” (“Jiving”) and shows him trying to adapt to the circumstances of his first job: “The mattress ticking he shares in the work barracks/is brown and smells/from the sweat of two other men” (“Straw Hat”). But what does Thomas, accustomed to a landscape of spread-out cabins and siloes, make of Akron’s conglomeration of smokestacks and offices when he first sees it?

Thus, Thomas and Beulah proves quite uneven. While the narrative and characterization work overall, they are notably imperfect, and Dove indulges in the common habit in contemporary poetry of passing off obscurity as profundity. Most importantly, it leaves one uncertain of what exactly Dove wants us to get out of her grandparents’ lives from her work. The book’s theme is the narrative itself, how Thomas and Beulah came together and what happened afterward; the lesson that the story of the marriage offers the reader is anybody’s guess. What the theme achieves in pervading the narrative’s length and breadth it misses in depth.

After the Lost War , by Andrew Hudgins, traces most of the life of Nineteenth-Century poet and musician Sidney Lanier, including his service in the Confederate army, his poor years with his wife and growing family in his native Georgia (with stints in Alabama and Texas), his tenure as lead flutist in a Baltimore orchestra, and his final illness and death from tuberculosis. Like Thomas and Beulah , this book is a sequence of independent poems cohering narratively and structurally into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, organized into four sections corresponding to the major phases of Lanier’s life. The narrative drives steadily forward in the first and last sections, punctuated by flashbacks as in the early parts of Thomas and Beulah ’s two halves; these sections deal with Lanier’s central traumas, the Civil War and his terminal illness, so Hudgins here makes the chronology of these ordeals paramount. Since the second and third sections concern themselves more with the tone of Lanier’s everyday life, they consist more of sketches and isolated anecdotes of Lanier in the South and Baltimore, similarly to the middle of Thomas and Beulah ’s sections, than of successions of consecutive events.

The structure of individual poems also strikes the reader more in After the Lost War than in Thomas and Beulah . Most of the latter’s poems are short and either begin with a workmanlike, unfolding introduction and end in medias res or begin in medias res and end with a workmanlike, finalizing conclusion. The length of Hudgins’s poems varies more, and their structure also varies. Early in the book, many poems begin in medias res and then launch into a leisurely circuit from one aspect of the poem’s subject or theme to another via associative links. Later poems exhibit a “pinball” type of thematic development, the focus bouncing from one topic to another more suddenly—an approach that works especially well in passages where Lanier is delirious from his illness. In longer poems composed of numbered sections, the sections tend to be thematically discrete and combine to create a mosaic effect.

After the Lost War is thematically complex, encompassing several thematic strands: the majesty and mystery of nature, the horror of war, the power of art, the crossing and dissolution of boundaries, religious uncertainty, and knowledge of impending death. This abundance of themes deepens the characterization of Lanier; because we have many lenses through which to view him and how he views the world, we form a fuller sense of him as a person. But although the approach to and significance of these themes change over the course of the book, they don’t evolve—the changes don’t add up to anything or go anywhere. For the sake of brevity, suffice it to say that in the nature theme, for example, just the first quarter of the book casts nature in human terms, then casts humans in animal terms, portrays nature as hostile to humanity, meditates on human dissolution into nature after death, reprises nature’s hostility, vaunts the artist’s ability to modify nature, laments humanity’s destructive impact on nature, and depicts nature’s obliviousness to human tragedy. After the Lost War then returns to its early anthropomorphism of nature, celebrates the randomness and spontaneity of its beauty, yet again dwells on nature’s hostility, and yet again repeats the anthropomorphism trope. This series of lateral shifts within the theme continues for the rest of the book, merely exercising the theme rather than developing it, and typifies the book’s other themes as well. Hudgins settles for juggling these manifold aspects of his themes when he could have coordinated them into a progression contributing real import to the book.

In the preface to After the Lost War , Hudgins writes, “Though the poems are all spoken by a character I call Sidney Lanier, the voice of these poems will be unfamiliar to anyone who knows the writings of this historical figure…. I’d like to thank Lanier for allowing me to use the facts of his life—more or less—to see how I might have lived it if it had been mine.” By implication, Hudgins narrates Lanier’s life as if his voice were Lanier’s, and the voice we hear in this biographical ventriloquism is forthright yet measured, simple yet eloquent. In the opening stanza of “The Hornet’s Nest”—

We may have been just nine or ten, but still we knew it was a stupid thing to do. The drone drew us. We found it hanging, plump, beneath a cypress limb, vibrant with risk and fat with danger.

—the plain, straightforward diction of the first two lines reflecting Lanier’s childhood consciousness manages to evolve seamlessly into the more charged vocabulary of the following lines, a product of his adult recollection as narrator. This voice at times possesses a cheeky humor, as when Lanier remarks that when his young sons complain about the family’s meager, bean-based diet he “send[s] them off to bed, uncomforted,//their stomachs full. But full of such harsh food/that when I tiptoe in their darkened room/I’m scared to light a match” (“Sufficient Witness”). Yet the voice Hudgins gives to Lanier sometimes strikes discordant notes. It’s hard to reconcile the earthy, if tactful, wit of the preceding quote with Lanier’s hyperbolically Romantic address to a firefly he brushes off his hand: “‘Fly thou away and know that once/in midst of summer greenness thou/didst light upon a poet’s hand’” (“Serenades in Virginia”). Hudgins succumbs to triteness in “At Chancellorsville” in describing the Union line breaking “in animal disarray,” and to prosiness as he narrates Lanier’s search for his brother on the battlefield after Chancellorsville:

But I kept tripping over living men and had to stop and carry them to help or carry them until they died, which happened more than once upon my back. And I got angry with those men because they kept me from my search …

(“After the Wilderness”)

What’s more, both the phrase “in animal disarray” and the fourth and fifth lines of the above quote are unnecessary.

In addition to such redundancy on the level of particular lines, Hudgins commits redundancy in sketching the mood of the title poem’s setting of Montgomery, Alabama. In the first section, Lanier observes,

The trees stand motionless, like statues, and even when a breeze steals in, the leaves flap once, then idly swing in dull, half-hearted protest of the least disturbance of their rest. Our weekday streets are much like Sunday’s, so business, as you might expect, sets no one’s heart to fluttering.

In the third section, he inexplicably rehashes this portrayal of Montgomery’s mood: “Our world yawns in a witchery/of laziness. On us is cast/a spell, ‘an exposition of sleep’ …” Narrative redundancy crops up in “War’s End.” In its fourth section Lanier informs us, “When it was not against my lips,/I tucked the flute inside my sleeve/and held the left arm motionless/and stiff,” having already stated in the second section, “I tucked the flute inside my sleeve/and sailed, stiff armed, to prison camp.” Simple repetition also mars the book: after “The Hornet’s Nest,” three other poems contain anecdotes of children playing with wasps or bees. Lacking the significance that would raise them into motifs, these recurrences merely register as wearisome.

After the Lost War ’s most perplexing fault is its narrative lacunae. We don’t learn about Lanier’s marriage until a poem about his and his wife’s first anniversary. As mentioned, Hudgins recounts Lanier landing the position of an orchestra’s first flutist, but ignores his other Baltimore gig as lecturer in English literature at the newly opened Johns Hopkins University. Most fundamentally and most thematically relevant, his harrowing experience and memories of the war beg the question of why Lanier volunteered for the Confederate army. Hudgins’s postwar Lanier shows little solidarity with the prevailing Southern ethos of the time: he weeps after witnessing a lynching, and in a letter to his brother condemns the valorization of “the lost cause” and calls the Confederates “Ivanhoes of wickedness” (“The Cult of the Lost Cause”). Did Lanier support the Southern cause when he joined the army and become disillusioned with it through the war? Did he always hate the rhetoric of the slave-owning oligarchs but enlist because, like Inman in Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain , everyone else did? Was he just thirsty for adventure? The book’s themes, much of the narrative, and Lanier’s voice limn a complex and interesting personality, but the motives for the decision that had the most impact on the psychological and emotional tenor of Sidney Lanier’s life remain in the dark. This and the book’s other drawbacks give the impression that, despite its separate poems cohering into a master narrative, Hudgins did not sufficiently consider After the Lost War and its protagonist in their totality. Although he charts the course of Lanier’s life compellingly, events and ideas don’t appear to be weighed for their implications on the work as a whole or in relation to other events and ideas, rendering the work thorough but not comprehensive.

Like Derek Walcott’s previous book-length poem Omeros , Tiepolo’s Hound features a dual narrative. First, Walcott narrates the career of Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew of French background from St. Thomas in what were then the Danish Virgin Islands. In youth he leaves this colonial backwater for Paris, the hub of the art world and the heart of another colonial empire. For him, “St. Thomas meant the clouding of ambition,/its lowered sail a shirt draped on a chair,//its sorrow, the paint stains crusting an apron,/its past the weight of dust on furniture” (VI:2). Nonetheless, Pissarro feels a measure of guilt over leaving his home, imagining other islanders telling him shortly before his departure, “‘We know you going./We is your roots. Without us you weak’” (IV:4). And for all his reveling in his new environs in France, he finds that they sometimes

recalled those Sundays of Charlotte Amalie’s

and the bays of his childhood paradise. In a straw chair, by the Seine’s blue tablecloth …

he is pierced by the lances of Charlotte Amalie’s wharf, gulls’ handkerchiefs fluttering against the green.

Pissarro feels excluded from the Paris art establishment because of his colonial background: “Museums demean him. Island boy. The eye/of a crazed duke pursues him up the stairs//of the Louvre …//marbles turn their heads away from him …” (VI:1). After all, the masterpieces on view in its museums reflect the Old World’s reality and offer no room to the life of the New World in which he grew up: “There are no Negroes in the pantheon/of bleached albino marbles …” (VI:2). Eventually, he “endorsed the Salon’s by his own rejection,” internalizing the metropolitan assumption of superiority—“what was he but a backward, colonized Jew?” (X:1). Later, the Dreyfus Affair impresses upon Pissarro how precarious his ethnic, not only geographic, origin makes his situation in France.

In the second narrative, the speaker, effectively Walcott himself, recounts his own wrestling with his position as a St. Lucian in relation to the Eurocentric tradition of art. He begins his tale in the present with a belief in the equivalence of beauty as it is found in Europe and in the Caribbean, a belief more deep-seated and vital than the reflexive déjà vu of Pissarro’s homesickness:

… in the saffron of Tiepolo sunsets,

the turbulent paradise of bright rotundas over aisles of cane, and censer-carried mists,

then, blazing from the ridges of Maracas— the croton hues of the Impressionists.

He then proceeds to recount how he arrived at this conviction of equivalence. His education, from both library monographs on art and his dead father’s copies of works by British painters, teaches him to look to Europe as the source of artistic value—although he answers his own question of whether his father’s “distant landscapes/which his devotion copied … despise[d] the roots//and roofs of his island as inferior shapes/in the ministry of apprenticeship” with “Learning//did not betray his race if he copied a warship’s/final berth, a cinder in a Turner sunset burning …” (II:3). The speaker and his classmates are so imbued with the Eurocentric mindset regarding art, though, that they are “[f]lattered by any masterful representation/of things we knew, from Rubens’s black faces//devoutly drawn, to the fountaining elation/of feathery palms in an engraving’s stasis”; hence, the speaker develops a reverence for Paul Gauguin, who briefly resided in Martinique: “He, Saint Paul, saw the colour of his Muse/as a glowing ingot, her breasts were bronze//under the palm of a breadfruit’s fleur-de-lys,/his red road to Damascus through our mountains” (III:1).

Most of the speaker’s story revolves around a white hound in an old Italian painting he saw, evidently in a traveling exhibit, in New York during his youth. This detail has come to fascinate him, but it resides so far back in memory that he’s not sure whether the painting was by Tiepolo or Veronese; he entertains the possibility that he imagined it. The speaker’s obsession leads him to Venice in a fruitless attempt to find the hound and its painting. Throughout the poem, Walcott contrasts the sleek white canine with a starving black mongrel the speaker remembers from St. Lucia. The two dogs’ colors can hardly be coincidental: the well-fed white Venetian hound—the painting the speaker believes it appears in depicts a feast—represents the privilege enjoyed by the one-time imperial and still cultural centers of Europe, while the West Indian dog reflects the disadvantage of their erstwhile colonies populated by descendants of slaves. Toward the end of his search for the hound, the speaker realizes that, unlike his father (although Walcott doesn’t broach the reason for the difference), he has been co-opted into Eurocentrism: “I had followed in the footprints of the hound,/and not the hound my shadow, the hound was white …” Instead of the perhaps imaginary white hound emblematic of a “pure” European ideal, he finds the truth that he belongs to a hybrid Euro-African culture—hybrid like the black mongrel of his home island, or like “a bellowing Minotaur …//this mixed obscenity made by the two//coupling worlds …” (XX:4). Then, in a fantasy sequence, he imagines reproving Pissarro for abandoning, in spirit even more than in body, the West Indies: “I said, ‘You could have been our pioneer./Treacherous Gauguin judged you a second-rater.//Yours could have been his archipelago, where/hues are primal, red trees, green shade, blue water’” (XXIII:2).

Tiepolo’s Hound , too, suffers from many mistakes, the greatest being thematic. As the speaker forsakes his quest for the hound, he announces,

Over the years I abandoned the claim of a passion which, if it existed, naturally faded

from my island Pissarro … …. .… his exile dictated

by a fiction that sought from him discipleship in light and affection for our shacks and ridges

touched by crepuscular orange. No black steamship roiled in its wake a pain that was ever his;

no loss of St. Thomas.

This guilt over leaving St. Thomas, this beholdenness to his origins there, is the central tension of Pissarro’s story and character in the book. Even when Pissarro resents it, he must acknowledge its pull: “… he was determined,/when specters snubbed him in the ashen air,/to erase his island …” (VII:1). Yanking the rug out from under this tension undermines the character Pissarro’s human complexity and makes him no more than a personification of the Eurocentric attitude toward imperialism, race, and culture. Yet Walcott commits thematic inconsistency when, after declaring that Pissarro lost any sense of connection to St. Thomas he might have had, he speculates, “Camille Pissarro must have heard the noise/of loss-lamenting slaves, and if he did,//they tremble in the poplars of Pontoise,/the trembling, elegiac tongues he painted” (XXIV:4). Furthermore, late in the speaker’s hunt for the painted hound, the poem veers off into an extended examination of time, memory, and epistemology unlinked to the main theme of cultural geopolitics.

In the most glaring narrative flaw, the speaker says when the hound is introduced that he saw it at the “Modern”: New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a strange place for a centuries-old canvas. Later in Tiepolo’s Hound , he says it happened at the more likely Metropolitan Museum of Art. If this discrepancy intends to nod to the theme of memory’s unreliability, the speaker’s explicit meditation on that subject amply suffices; the discrepancy’s cost of puncturing the reader’s faith in the narrative, not simply the narrator, far outweighs its dubious benefit of thematic reinforcement. Like Beulah’s disaffection in Dove’s book, Pissarro’s feeling of failure as an artist gets overplayed, and his reaction to it is more than a bit contradictory. Poor and under mounting debt, he refuses to change his style to make his art more sellable, yet anxiously hopes for a banker he meets to buy his work. His wife

… thought of carrying the two children to the river and drowning them with her, she was that depressed.

But none of this meant anything to their father whose arrogance did nothing to accommodate

her desperation, which meant he would rather they perished than pawn his work.

The later death of a young daughter, however, devastates him. Finally, like the tension in his feelings about St. Thomas, Pissarro’s share of the narrative is abandoned rather than resolved. We leave him in Book Three in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, just as self-doubting as ever. He reappears in Book Four only for his imaginary showdown with the speaker and then in a snapshot of him as an old man just before death, where Walcott observes, “To endure affliction with no affection gone/seems to have been the settlement in those eyes …” In the quote preceding this one, Pissarro endures affliction with just about no affection intact. What happens to change him? How does he arrive at the serenity Walcott describes—“the eyes are sunken, but their stare no sadder//under the arched brows than when the family strolled/the Danish stonework of Dronningens Gade” (XXVI:2)?

Tiepolo’s Hound is the only book-length poem of the four volumes examined in this essay. Its chapters consist of four sections and are organized into four “books”—Book One about Pissarro’s and the speaker’s early life in the Caribbean; Book Two about Pissarro’s settling in France; Book Three covering Pissarro’s life from the Franco-Prussian War to the Dreyfus Affair, with an interlude in St. Lucia narrated by the speaker; and Book Four relating the speaker’s search for the hound and his confrontation with Pissarro, plus presenting the parting image of the elderly artist. Despite its status as a single full-length work, Tiepolo’s Hound is the least cohesively organized of the books considered. The book opens to structural jaggedness: the first chapter’s first section sets the scene for Pissarro’s youth in St. Thomas, then the rest of the first chapter and the next several chapters detail the speaker’s artistic education before beginning Pissarro’s narrative in earnest in the middle of Book One. Lyrical disquisitions on the West Indies, Spain, and England thrust into the middle of Books Three and Four bear little relevance to the narratives, which end a full three chapters before the book. Tiepolo’s Hound also contains multiple instances of sections unrelated to the rest of a chapter or fitting better in other chapters, opening sections that seem continuations of previous chapters, and long sections with two different themes or subjects better off divided. The four-section chapters often work well in unfolding or pivoting among different aspects of a topic or situation, but in the cases referred to the uniform application of the structure renders it a Procrustean bed.

If the reader is not likely to know what he or she should take away from the lives of Rita Dove’s grandparents, the reader can only assume he or she should take everything from Camille Pissarro’s life, because Walcott tries to make Pissarro everything. He makes Pissarro long for his native St. Thomas and turn his back on it, indifferent toward his Jewishness and haunted by the Dreyfus Affair and by the Inquisition that drove his ancestors from Portugal, a callous father and a grieving father. In Omeros , a work thematically founded on the dialectic of African and European ancestry and culture uniting to form Caribbean identity and culture, the opposing facets of Pissarro’s character probably would have resolved into some kind of synthesis. But Tiepolo’s Hound rests only on the dichotomy of Europe and the Caribbean. Their similar aspects blend into each other, as when the speaker sees the beauty of European paintings in St. Lucia’s landscape and Pissarro sees the beauty of St. Thomas’s landscape in France’s, but neither their similar nor their opposing aspects combine to create a new entity. Tiepolo’s Hound writes off as irretrievable the African heritage that Omeros imaginatively recreates as a component of West Indian identity. Mixture, then, is not the product of a process taking place in the West Indies in Tiepolo’s Hound but its given condition—the “coupling” of the “two … worlds” that produces the speaker’s Minotaur and black dog having happened long before the moment of utterance—and synthesis with Europe would produce only further mixture. Thus, in the thematic microcosm of Pissarro’s character, his contradictions cannot be reconciled, and with no place for synthesis in the book’s thematic schema Pissarro’s contradictory facets merely negate each other instead of complementing each other. Consequently, by meaning everything, Pissarro’s life ends up meaning nothing.

In its most general features, Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie by Douglas Burnet Smith resembles the other books considered in this essay: a sequence of poems exploring a person’s life, organized into sections corresponding to phases of that life. In a distinguishing difference, Sister Prometheus delves further and more systematically into its subject’s childhood, permitting us to glimpse the origins of the themes that come to predominate her life as a whole. A unique structural touch in Sister Prometheus is the proem that precedes the initial section, spoken by Curie from the afterlife as she assesses her lot as one of the few women among France’s illustrious dead in the Panthéon. After the speaker’s narrative in Tiepolo’s Hound ,starting the book at the narrative’s end so that everything else works up to it could have seemed hackneyed, but the originality of Curie’s posthumous, disembodied voice prevents this. Last and certainly not least, Sister Prometheus consists of prose poems, making for both a grounded and a fluid, open-ended style.

As in After the Lost War , a number of themes run through Smith’s book—mercifully fewer than in Hudgins’s. Resistance to domination emerges first. In Curie’s childhood, this takes the form of resistance to Russian occupation of Poland; in the first poem of the first section, Curie describes her parents’ wedding photograph: “In one corner of my father’s smile, there’s the village he’ll be banished to because he won’t practice the Czar’s customs, just to advance himself. The village is wrecked, empty, nameless. Under my mother’s eyes are dark craters a bomb has left in Badusky Street” (“Wedding Photo: Wladyslaw Sklodowski, Bronislawa Boguska, 1860”). Marie (or Maria while she still lives in Poland) participates passively in this resistance herself, dancing for joy as a schoolgirl over the assassination of Czar Alexander II. And even in adolescence, even before the scientific world’s and the press’s subordination of her role to her husband Pierre’s in the scientific work they collaborated on as equals, she transfers this resistance to male dominance:

… Maciej Skiewicz wanted me to play Sweet Desdemona to his Otello, & lie down like a bleating lamb and be grateful for being smothered with his affection into a comfortable dullness, silenced into nullity. Even then I had thought there was a small chance I could love him until … he pronounced all women’s education unnecessary, his strenuous intellect marching his reasons in an impressive column ahead of us, along the trail. When he’d finished … he put a gentle hand to my cheek, & pledged a life’s protection. I thanked him … & splashed a palmful of the pure, perishable water on my face, twice, where his hand had touched it. (“The Cascade, Mount Rysy, 1888”)

Science as an avenue to the sublime and the magical constitutes another major theme, which the book predicates on loss of religious faith. In another of the childhood poems, the elder brother of one of Curie’s classmates is arrested and executed for plotting against the Russians. Before the day of the hanging, Curie and her friends “‘kept watch’ all night with Léonie. At dawn we fell on our knees and prayed. Léonie said there was no use praying, & cursed because she knew there was no one listening …” (“The Chapel of the Visitation, 1887”). The pursuit of empirical knowledge from then on takes on a sacred character as a substitute for religion to Curie. Books on science sent from her sister, who preceded her to France, she calls “manna from Paris,” and she reminisces about “the barometer Papa hung like a crucifix in his study” (“Floating Academy, 1889”; “Millennium Eclogue, L’An 2000”). Most sharply, the religious article used and the timeline in the narration of Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity echoes the Resurrection:

Becquerel thought it was sunlight causing Uranium salts to phosphoresce, to penetrate that photographic plate. So he took a thin copper cross, slid it between some black paper taped to the photographic plate & the Uranium salts. He expected sunlight to ‘photograph’ a pattern of the cross on the plate. The sun disappeared for two days, being the sun, in February, in Paris. In the gray light of the third morning, Becquerel developed the plate, expecting to find nothing…. But he saw a hazy image of the cross, stark white against the black plate. (“Henri Becquerel, 1896”)

Science even takes on occult qualities, as it uses hidden forces built into the universe to work wonders that defy our everyday notions of the universe’s operation: “… arcs of equations I copied, baroque proof on the page that the sun can be levered from the earth with a column of tiny numbers” (“‘I Take the Sun and Throw It …’”). Curie depicts herself in this magian role as she works to isolate radium: “I must have looked like a sorceress, stirring a huge pot over a fire all winter in the courtyard, adding more Pitcheblende, stirring …” (“Henri Becquerel, 1896”).

Death and loss are the other major theme of Sister Prometheus : Curie’s mother and sister die in her girlhood, Pierre is killed by an overturning horse-drawn wagon in the street, and she X-rays wounded soldiers amid the carnage of World War I. Throughout the book, death and loss are closely tied with her life’s work. As her mother lays dying, Curie remarks, “She would always wake the moment I looked up from my book, & then, with the wearied beauty of habit, quietly tell me to go back to my studies, that the task I had before me was sacred: to make Poland proud of my achievements” (“Tuberculosis, 1876”). Those achievements look like they might be able to keep death at bay when Pierre demonstrates radioactivity’s potential to treat cancer. But radioactivity cannot prevent Pierre’s own death, and can only diagnose rather than heal the injuries of the butchered soldiers of the war; ultimately, Curie realizes that it also brings death nearer:

Look at my fingers, scarred and gnarled. How could I have known?—I was so proud of my Emanation Service, Radium ampoules at the Front…. I do remember reading about Edison’s assistant—the cancer—but how could I have known? Then Demalander & Deminitroux, dead within four days of each other, buried with Thorium X coating their lungs. Nine dead American women, luminous watch-dial painters from New Jersey, ‘pointing’ their brushes with their moist lips—this made of me a dubious martyr, “Our Lady of Radioactivity.” (“Radium Necrosis, 1925”)

Indeed, late in the book, half-life becomes a motif as Curie imaginatively links an element’s diminution in radioactivity with her own gradual, inexorable decline in physical power in old age. Joie de vivre animates Sister Prometheus throughout, however. Grieve though she must, the world enchants Curie far too much for her to yield to despair or morbidity. In “The Solvay Conference, Brussels, 1911,” recounting a meeting with Max Planck and Albert Einstein, Planck proclaims dourly, “‘“Life” is, was, & always will be a quite literal matter of rampant disintegration.’” But Curie tacitly concurs instead with Einstein’s perspective at the end of the poem: “‘“Life”’ could be, he said, ‘the continual revision of a gorgeous elegy.’”

Of the group of biographical poetry books covered, Sister Prometheus has the most cohesive thematic development and organization. It strikes a happy medium between the plain, subtextless thematics of Thomas and Beulah and the all too protean shifts of theme in After the Lost War and Tiepolo’s Hound . Smith balances an array of themes, but just as many as can be balanced. He connects one to another—Curie’s career in science both resisting male domination of that field and attempting to resist death—deftly and subtly, and threads them through the book with a light touch. Although the astute reader can tell Smith’s themes are the book’s guiding force, they seem to run under the surface of the narrative like subterranean streams until welling up just often enough to keep the reader in mind of them.

Sister Prometheus is far from free of flaws, but they are fewer and more minor than those in the other books. In terms of narrative, chronology poses a major issue. For no discernible reason, narrative or thematic, “Sceaux, 1905” is placed in the middle of a string of poems set in 1903; the poems in the last section up to Curie’s death (more poems spoken from beyond the grave ensue) are completely jumbled chronologically. Moreover, this section is labeled with the dates “1918-1937” but contains poems dated 1911 and 1912, and two of the poems set after Curie’s death are dated 1995 and 2000. As the poem devoted to the event indicates, Curie died in 1934—no event in the section, in fact, occurs in 1937. The dates of events hold much less weight in the book than the events themselves, but Smith’s handling of them can’t avoid giving the impression of an addled grasp of his narrative. Also, background information on the “Floating Academy,” the unofficial college in Warsaw for women barred from universities where Curie studied before the Sorbonne, would have made the book all the more colorful.

Smith’s style achieves the perfect balance of incisive exactness and lyric profusion for the voice of someone enchanted by the rational apprehension of invisible, matter-defying forces. Nonetheless, like Dove, every so often Smith betrays a penchant for the turn of phrase whose abstruseness lends it a veneer of runic wisdom masking its utter senselessness. When the lover Curie takes in her widowhood, physicist Paul Langevin, participates in a duel, Smith writes, “But I had to come home & read this account of … how ‘France barely missed being deprived of a precious brain.’ I’d had enough of brains, & the loss of brains. I wanted the vast, empty gray brain of the sea” (“The Duel, 11:00 a.m., 26 November 1911, Bois de Vincennes”). The image of the sea enters the poem completely out of left field. Secondly, Smith leaves unclear whether the figurative brain is part of the sea, an imagined organ of it, or whether Curie calls the sea itself a “brain”; both possibilities are equally outlandish. In another poor stylistic choice, Smith overloads the poems with run-on sentences (a fault Walcott also commits, but less heavily). He probably wants to convey the rapture of Curie’s love affair with science in his unbounded syntax, but I have a hard time imagining that a woman whose career required great deliberateness and precision would cram two or three grammatically complete sentences into one, unseparated by semicolons. In addition, picayune though they might seem, Smith’s tics of capitalizing the first letter of common nouns like the names of chemical elements and plants—as if Curie spoke German instead of Polish and French—and of substituting ampersands for “and” at almost every opportunity quickly grow grating.

Most disconcerting, Sister Prometheus includes a few outright errors. Smith dates the poem in which Curie celebrates Czar Alexander II’s death 1879, but he was killed in 1881. He spells the name of the familiar small, long-bodied dog breed “Daschund” instead of “dachshund” (granted, the book’s editor might bear more guilt for this mistake than Smith himself). Some poems, though not consecutive, share the same title with Roman numerals appended to mark their order; the title “Pierre VI” repeats on page 69 and page 76, and the “Observations” sequence skips from IV to VI with no V. A table of contents that lists each poem’s title, rather than only the sections’ titles, could have prevented this. As with Smith’s problem with self-prescribed date ranges, these blunders in numerical sequencing intimate that for all of his narrative’s skill, interest, and delight, he hasn’t entered into it, and thus into the reality of his poems, fully.

Given theme’s primacy in biographical poetry, why do most of the books treated here fumble with their themes—underdeveloping them, overworking them, undercutting them, destabilizing them? Clearly they do want to find significance in their protagonists’ lives; that’s why theme, which conveys this significance, plays so prominent a part in them. The answer might lie in that they pursue the wrong kind of significance: meaning, not purpose. Things have meaning, but actions have purpose, and a life as it is lived is a large, continual action. Sister Prometheus proves the one gratifying book among them when all is said and done most likely because it focuses on the purpose of Curie’s life in bringing the unseen mysteries of the physical universe to light, and on her awareness and pursuit of that purpose. Tiepolo’s Hound concerns itself with what Pissarro and the speaker mean in terms of the relationship between Europe and its former colonies, instead of with the purpose of their lives and art. After the Lost War sometimes tackles, sometimes skirts the meaning of individual incidents in its story and hints at all too many purposes for Lanier’s life, writing, and music without dwelling on them, and Thomas and Beulah offers little in the way of meaning and less of purpose. To what extent these works’ disregard of purpose in life reflects our society and culture viewing the self as a project to cultivate and life as an experience to enjoy independently from one’s relationship with others, rather than a mission to fulfill and a contribution to other selves and lives, and thereby indicts it and their authors, is beyond this essay’s scope and a judgment I would hesitate to venture. But to the extent that it impairs their treatment of their subjects’ significance, confusing meaning for purpose constitutes an aesthetic fault on the part of most of these poets.

Works Cited

• Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah . Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon U. Press, 1986.
• Hudgins, Andrew. After the Lost War : A Narrative . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.
• Smith, Douglas Burnet. Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie . Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn, 2008.
• Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

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