When was prayers of steel written

I got the blues. Carl Sandburg Wilderness There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. CHICKENS I am The Great White Way of the city: When you ask what is my desire, I answer: "Girls fresh as country wild flowers, With young faces tired of the cows and barns, Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries, Slender supple girls with shapely legs, Lure in the arch of their little shoulders And wisdom from the prairies to cry only softly at the ashes of my mysteries.

O little roses And broken leaves And petal wisps: You that so flung your crimson To the sun Only yesterday. HOME Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of: I heard it in the air of one night when I listened To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness. Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. Jobs for Poets.

The houses go wild when you finish the act shimmying a fast shimmy to The Livery Stable Blues. It is long ago, Elsie Flimmerwon, I saw your mother over a washtub in a grape arbor when your father came in with the locomotor ataxia shuffle. Then you were a little thing in checked gingham and your mother wiped your nose and said; You little fool, keep off the streets.

Now you are a big girl at last and streetfuls of people read your name and a line of people shaped like the letter S stand at the box office to see you shimmy. Gather the stars if you wish it so. Gather the songs and keep them. Gather the faces of women. Gather for keeping years and years. And then. Let me lift and loosen old foundations. Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. Bent me and hammer me into a crowbar Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations. Lay e on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Drive me into the girders that hold A skyscraper together Take red-hot rivets and fasten me Into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a Skyscraper through blue nights Into white stars. Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December generation is simply her poetic gift, something in Amherst, in western Massachusetts, and died attributable more to nature and culture than to there on 15 May Her parents were Edward some emotional trauma. Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson The family included three We know much of Dickinson's life through her children: Austin , Emily, and Lavinia correspondences.

She maintained a lifelong Most of the family belonged to correspondence with Susan Dickinson, even though the Congregational Church, though the poet herself they were next-door neighbors; this never became a member. The Dickinsons were correspondence, preserved by Susan, is the source well-off and well-educated.

Both Edward and for many of the poet's manuscripts. But Emily Austin were college graduates, leaders in the Dickinson also corresponded with school friends, community and of Amherst College. Edward with her cousins Fanny and Loo Norcross, and with Dickinson was a Whig later a Republican several people of letters, including Samuel Bowles, representative to state and national legislatures. Holland, T. Higginson, Emily had a strong secondary education and a year and Helen Hunt Jackson.

She compiled a manuscript record of called the Homestead, built by her grandfather nearly 1, poems, along with many letters. In or Samuel Fowler Dickinson in This house was around she began to keep manuscript books sold out of the family, however, in , and not of her poetry, the "fascicles," hand-produced and re-purchased by Edward Dickinson till ; so hand-bound. In the early s she produced most of the poet's younger years were lived in hundreds of poems each year.

In and , other houses. She cared manuscript books. But her production of for her parents in their later years and was a manuscripts continued at a slower pace until her companion to her sister Lavinia, who also stayed last illnesses in Neither sister married. The extended Dickinson family included Austin's Though she wrote hundreds of poems, Dickinson wife Susan Huntington Gilbert, who lived for many never published a book of poetry.

The few poems years next door in the house called The Evergreens, published during her lifetime were anonymous and Susan and Austin's three children. The reasons why she never published are still unclear. A myth promoted The myth, of course, is of Dickinson as a reclusive by William Luce's play The Belle of Amherst is spinster-poet, brooding over a deep romantic that Higginson discouraged her writing; however, it mystery in her past.