's Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of Song Dynasty; fan mounted as album leaf on silk, four columns in cursive script.]]

Poetry (from the Latin poeta, a poet) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. It is published in dedicated magazines (the longest established being Poetry and Oxford Poetry), individual collections and wider anthologies.

Poetry and discussions of it have a long history. Early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song, and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing, such as manifestos, biographies, essays, and novels . From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language.

Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the words, or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony, and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor, simile, and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures and genres, responding to the characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. While readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as being written in lines based upon rhyme and regular meter, there are traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony. Much of modern British and American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing (among other things) the principle of euphony itself, to the extent that sometimes it deliberately does not rhyme or keep to set rhythms at all. In today's globalized world poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures and languages.

History

tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Akkadian, circa 2nd millennium BC]] Poetry as an art form may predate literacy. Many ancient works, from the Indian Vedas (1700–1200 BC) and Zoroaster's Gathas (1200-900 BC) to the Odyssey (800–675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies. Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.

The oldest surviving epic poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, now Iraq), which was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus. Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Old Iranian books the Gathic Avesta and Yasna, the Roman national epic, Virgil's Aeneid, and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.

The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in "poetics"—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as the Chinese through the Shi Jing, one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More recently, thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.

can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. Poetry that records historic events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes (hymns, psalms, suras, and hadiths) is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegy and tragedy are meant to evoke deep emotional responses. Other contexts include Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech, political rhetoric and invective, light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.

The Polish historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, in a paper on "The Concept of Poetry," traces the evolution of what is in fact two concepts of poetry. Tatarkiewicz points out that the term is applied to two distinct things that, as the poet Paul Valéry observed, "at a certain point find union. Poetry [...] is an art based on language. But poetry also has a more general meaning [...] that is difficult to define because it is less determinate: poetry expresses a certain state of mind."

Western traditions

Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, the existing fragments of Aristotle's Poetics describe three genres of poetry—the epic, the comic, and the tragic—and develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in each genre, based on the underlying purposes of the genre. Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.

Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure.

This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic, "Negative Capability". This "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into the 20th century.

During this period, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.

20th-century disputes

Some 20th-century literary theorists, relying less on the opposition of prose and poetry, focused on the poet as simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of a poem with words, and creative acts in other media such as carpentry. Yet other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided, as when Archibald MacLeish concludes his paradoxical poem, "Ars Poetica", with the lines: "A poem should not mean / but be." See also Wallace Stevens's comparison of poetry to music in "To the One of Fictive Music", poetry "musing the obscure" so as to "give motion to perfection more serene" than any other music.

Disputes over the definition of poetry, and over poetry's distinction from other genres of literature, have been inextricably intertwined with the debate over the role of poetic form. The rejection of traditional forms and structures for poetry that began in the first half of the 20th century coincided with a questioning of the purpose and meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and of distinctions between poetry and prose, particularly given examples of poetic prose and prosaic poetry. Numerous modernist poets have written in non-traditional forms or in what traditionally would have been considered prose, although their writing was generally infused with poetic diction and often with rhythm and tone established by non-metrical means. While there was a substantial formalist reaction within the modernist schools to the breakdown of structure, this reaction focused as much on the development of new formal structures and syntheses as on the revival of older forms and structures.

More recently, postmodernism has fully embraced MacLeish's concept and come to regard the boundaries between prose and poetry, and also among genres of poetry, as having meaning only as cultural artifacts. Postmodernism goes beyond modernism's emphasis on the creative role of the poet, to emphasize the role of the reader of a text (Hermeneutics), and to highlight the complex cultural web within which a poem is read. Today, throughout the world, poetry often incorporates poetic form and diction from other cultures and from the past, further confounding attempts at definition and classification that were once sensible within a tradition such as the Western canon.

Elements

Prosody

Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter, although closely related, should be distinguished. Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus, the meter of a line may be described as being "iambic", but a full description of the rhythm would require noting where the language causes one to pause or accelerate and how the meter interacts with other elements of the language. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.

Rhythm

The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras, depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches. Japanese is a mora-timed language. Syllable-timed languages include Latin, Catalan, French, Leonese, Galician and Spanish. English, Russian and, generally, German are stress-timed languages. Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages also can rely on either pitch, such as in Vedic or ancient Greek, or tone. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, and most subsaharan languages.

Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line.

The chief device of ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry, including many of the psalms, was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three. Parallelism lent itself to antiphonal or call-and-response performance, which could also be reinforced by intonation. Thus, Biblical poetry relies much less on metrical feet to create rhythm, but instead creates rhythm based on much larger sound units of lines, phrases and sentences. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar) which ensured a rhythm. In Chinese poetry, tones as well as stresses create rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the level tone, rising tone, departing tone, and entering tone. Note that other classifications may have as many as eight tones for Chinese and six for Vietnamese.

The formal patterns of meter used in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate contemporary English poetry. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence rather than a regular meter. Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams are three notable poets who reject the idea that regular accentual meter is critical to English poetry. Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to accentual rhythm.

Meter

In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. Thus, "iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the "iamb". This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. Similarly, "dactylic hexameter", comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the "dactyl". Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod. More recently, iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter have been used by William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively.

Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines. In English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed, where one syllable with a long vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables with short vowels. For example, in ancient Greek poetry, meter is based solely on syllable duration rather than stress. In some languages, such as English, stressed syllables are typically pronounced with greater volume, greater length, and higher pitch, and are the basis for poetic meter. In ancient Greek, these attributes were independent of each other; long vowels and syllables including a vowel plus more than one consonant actually had longer duration, approximately double that of a short vowel, while pitch and stress (dictated by the accent) were not associated with duration and played no role in the meter. Thus, a dactylic hexameter line could be envisioned as a musical phrase with six measures, each of which contained either a half note followed by two quarter notes (i.e. a long syllable followed by two short syllables), or two half notes (i.e. two long syllables); thus, the substitution of two short syllables for one long syllable resulted in a measure of the same length. Such substitution in a stress language, such as English, would not result in the same rhythmic regularity. In Anglo-Saxon meter, the unit on which lines are built is a half-line containing two stresses rather than a foot. Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables.

As an example of how a line of meter is defined, in English-language iambic pentameter, each line has five metrical feet, and each foot is an iamb, or an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. When a particular line is scanned, there may be variations upon the basic pattern of the meter; for example, the first foot of English iambic pentameters is quite often inverted, meaning that the stress falls on the first syllable. The generally accepted names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include: illustration to Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", which is written mainly in anapestic tetrameter. "In the midst of the word he was trying to say / In the midst of his laughter and glee / He had softly and suddenly vanished away / For the snark was a boojum, you see."]]

iamb – one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable

trochee – one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable

dactyl – one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables

anapest – two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable

spondee – two stressed syllables together

pyrrhic – two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter)

The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:

monometer - one foot

dimeter – two feet

trimeter – three feet

tetrameter – four feet

pentameter – five feet

hexameter – six feet

heptameter – seven feet

octameter – eight feet

There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb of four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Languages which utilize vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds.

Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse. The dactyl, on the other hand, almost gallops along. And, in the manner of The Night Before Christmas or Dr. Seuss, the anapest is said to produce a light-hearted, comic feel.

There is debate over how useful a multiplicity of different "feet" is in describing meter. For example, Robert Pinsky has argued that while dactyls are important in classical verse, English dactylic verse uses dactyls very irregularly and can be better described based on patterns of iambs and anapests, feet which he considers natural to the language. Actual rhythm is significantly more complex than the basic scanned meter described above, and many scholars have sought to develop systems that would scan such complexity. Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that the term "scud" be used to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.

Metrical patterns

Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearian iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the Anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular. Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English. Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include: Iambic pentameter (John Milton, Paradise Lost) Dactylic hexameter (Homer, Iliad; Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphoses) Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"; Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin) Trochaic octameter (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven") Anapestic tetrameter (Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"; Lord Byron, Don Juan) Alexandrine (Jean Racine, Phèdre)

Rhyme, alliteration, assonance

epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse and paragraphs, not in lines or stanzas.]] Rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance are ways of creating repetitive patterns of sound. They may be used as an independent structural element in a poem, to reinforce rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental element.

Rhyme consists of identical ("hard-rhyme") or similar ("soft-rhyme") sounds placed at the ends of lines or at predictable locations within lines ("internal rhyme"). Languages vary in the richness of their rhyming structures; Italian, for example, has a rich rhyming structure permitting maintenance of a limited set of rhymes throughout a lengthy poem. The richness results from word endings that follow regular forms. English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other languages, is less rich in rhyme. The degree of richness of a language's rhyming structures plays a substantial role in determining what poetic forms are commonly used in that language.

Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur. This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas. Alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rich rhyming structures. Assonance, where the use of similar vowel sounds within a word rather than similar sounds at the beginning or end of a word, was widely used in skaldic poetry, but goes back to the Homeric epic. Because verbs carry much of the pitch in the English language, assonance can loosely evoke the tonal elements of Chinese poetry and so is useful in translating Chinese poetry. Consonance occurs where a consonant sound is repeated throughout a sentence without putting the sound only at the front of a word. Consonance provokes a more subtle effect than alliteration and so is less useful as a structural element.

In 'A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry' (Longmans, 1969) Geoffrey Leech identified six different types of sound patterns or rhyme forms. These are defined as six possible ways in which either one or two of the structural parts of the related words can vary. The unvarying parts are in upper case/bold. C symbolises a consonant cluster, not a single consonant, V a vowel.

Rhyming schemes

and Beatrice see God as a point of light surrounded by angels. A Doré illustration to the Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto 28.]] In many languages, including modern European languages and Arabic, poets use rhyme in set patterns as a structural element for specific poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of structural rhyme is not universal even within the European tradition. Much modern poetry avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages, in part under the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus (modern Spain). Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively from the first development of literary Arabic in the sixth century, as in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some rhyming schemes have become associated with a specific language, culture or period, while other rhyming schemes have achieved use across languages, cultures or time periods. Some forms of poetry carry a consistent and well-defined rhyming scheme, such as the chant royal or the rubaiyat, while other poetic forms have variable rhyme schemes.

Most rhyme schemes are described using letters that correspond to sets of rhymes, so if the first, second and fourth lines of a quatrain rhyme with each other and the third line does not rhyme, the quatrain is said to have an "a-a-b-a" rhyme scheme. This rhyme scheme is the one used, for example, in the rubaiyat form. Similarly, an "a-b-b-a" quatrain (what is known as "enclosed rhyme") is used in such forms as the Petrarchan sonnet. Some types of more complicated rhyming schemes have developed names of their own, separate from the "a-b-c" convention, such as the ottava rima and terza rima. The types and use of differing rhyming schemes is discussed further in the main article.

Ottava rima

Ottava rima is a rhyming scheme using a stanza of eight lines with an alternating a-b rhyming scheme for the first six lines followed by a closing couplet. First used by Boccaccio, it was developed for heroic epics but has also been used for mock-heroic poetry.

Terza rima

Dante's Divine Comedy is written in terza rima, where each stanza has three lines, with the first and third rhyming, and the second line rhyming with the first and third lines of the next stanza (thus, a-b-a / b-c-b / c-d-c, et cetera.) in a chain rhyme. The terza rima provides a flowing, progressive sense to the poem, and used skilfully it can evoke a sense of motion, both forward and backward. Terza rima is appropriately used in lengthy poems in languages with rich rhyming structures (such as Italian, with its many common word endings).

Form

Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry, and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets eschew recognisable structures or forms, and write in free verse. But poetry remains distinguished from prose by its form; some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in even the best free verse, however much such structures may appear to have been ignored. Similarly, in the best poetry written in classic styles there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect.

Among major structural elements used in poetry are the line, the stanza or verse paragraph, and larger combinations of stanzas or lines such as cantos. Also sometimes used are broader visual presentations of words and calligraphy. These basic units of poetic form are often combined into larger structures, called poetic forms or poetic modes (see following section), as in the sonnet or haiku.

Lines and stanzas

Poetry is often separated into lines on a page. These lines may be based on the number of metrical feet, or may emphasize a rhyming pattern at the ends of lines. Lines may serve other functions, particularly where the poem is not written in a formal metrical pattern. Lines can separate, compare or contrast thoughts expressed in different units, or can highlight a change in tone. See the article on line breaks for information about the division between lines.

Lines of poems are often organized into stanzas, which are denominated by the number of lines included. Thus a collection of two lines is a couplet (or distich), three lines a triplet (or tercet), four lines a quatrain, five lines a quintain (or cinquain), six lines a sestet, and eight lines an . These lines may or may not relate to each other by rhyme or rhythm. For example, a couplet may be two lines with identical meters which rhyme or two lines held together by a common meter alone. Stanzas often have related couplets or triplets within them.

's poem, "Noch, ulitsa, fonar, apteka" ("Night, street, lamp, drugstore"), on a wall in Leiden]]

Other poems may be organized into verse paragraphs, in which regular rhymes with established rhythms are not used, but the poetic tone is instead established by a collection of rhythms, alliterations, and rhymes established in paragraph form. Many medieval poems were written in verse paragraphs, even where regular rhymes and rhythms were used.

In many forms of poetry, stanzas are interlocking, so that the rhyming scheme or other structural elements of one stanza determine those of succeeding stanzas. Examples of such interlocking stanzas include, for example, the ghazal and the villanelle, where a refrain (or, in the case of the villanelle, refrains) is established in the first stanza which then repeats in subsequent stanzas. Related to the use of interlocking stanzas is their use to separate thematic parts of a poem. For example, the strophe, antistrophe and epode of the ode form are often separated into one or more stanzas. In such cases, or where structures are meant to be highly formal, a stanza will usually form a complete thought, consisting of full sentences and cohesive thoughts.

In some cases, particularly lengthier formal poetry such as some forms of epic poetry, stanzas themselves are constructed according to strict rules and then combined. In skaldic poetry, the dróttkvætt stanza had eight lines, each having three "lifts" produced with alliteration or assonance. In addition to two or three alliterations, the odd numbered lines had partial rhyme of consonants with dissimilar vowels, not necessarily at the beginning of the word; the even lines contained internal rhyme in set syllables (not necessarily at the end of the word). Each half-line had exactly six syllables, and each line ended in a trochee. The arrangement of dróttkvætts followed far less rigid rules than the construction of the individual dróttkvætts.

Visual presentation

Even before the advent of printing, the visual appearance of poetry often added meaning or depth. Acrostic poems conveyed meanings in the initial letters of lines or in letters at other specific places in a poem. In Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese poetry, the visual presentation of finely calligraphed poems has played an important part in the overall effect of many poems.

With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the mass-produced visual presentations of their work. Visual elements have become an important part of the poet's toolbox, and many poets have sought to use visual presentation for a wide range of purposes. Some Modernist poets have made the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page an integral part of the poem's composition. At times, this complements the poem's rhythm through visual caesuras of various lengths, or creates juxtapositions so as to accentuate meaning, ambiguity or irony, or simply to create an aesthetically pleasing form. In its most extreme form, this can lead to concrete poetry or asemic writing.

Diction

illustration to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Goblin Market used complex poetic diction in nursery-rhyme form: "We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits: / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?"]] Poetic diction treats of the manner in which language is used, and refers not only to the sound but also to the underlying meaning and its interaction with sound and form. Many languages and poetic forms have very specific poetic dictions, to the point where distinct grammars and dialects are used specifically for poetry. Registers in poetry can range from strict employment of ordinary speech patterns, as favoured in much late 20th century prosody, through to highly ornate and aureate uses of language by such as the medieval and renaissance makars.

Poetic diction can include rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor, as well as tones of voice, such as irony. Aristotle wrote in the Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." Since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for a poetic diction that de-emphasizes rhetorical devices, attempting instead the direct presentation of things and experiences and the exploration of tone. On the other hand, Surrealists have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.

Allegorical stories are central to the poetic diction of many cultures, and were prominent in the West during classical times, the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Rather than being fully allegorical, however, a poem may contain symbols or allusions that deepen the meaning or effect of its words without constructing a full allegory.

Another strong element of poetic diction can be the use of vivid imagery for effect. The juxtaposition of unexpected or impossible images is, for example, a particularly strong element in surrealist poetry and haiku. Vivid images are often, as well, endowed with symbolism.

Many poetic dictions use repetitive phrases for effect, either a short phrase (such as Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn" or "the wine-dark sea") or a longer refrain. Such repetition can add a somber tone to a poem, as in many odes, or can be laced with irony as the context of the words changes. For example, in Antony's famous eulogy of Caesar in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Antony's repetition of the words, "For Brutus is an honorable man," moves from a sincere tone to one that exudes irony.

Forms

Specific poetic forms have been developed by many cultures. In more developed, closed or "received" poetic forms, the rhyming scheme, meter and other elements of a poem are based on sets of rules, ranging from the relatively loose rules that govern the construction of an elegy to the highly formalized structure of the ghazal or villanelle. Described below are some common forms of poetry widely used across a number of languages. Additional forms of poetry may be found in the discussions of poetry of particular cultures or periods and in the glossary.

Sonnet

Among the most common forms of poetry through the ages is the sonnet, which by the 13th century was a poem of fourteen lines following a set rhyme scheme and logical structure. A sonnet's first four lines typically introduce the topic. A sonnet usually follows an a-b-a-b rhyme pattern. The sonnet's conventions have changed over its history, and so there are several different sonnet forms. Traditionally, in sonnets English poets use iambic pentameter, the Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets being especially notable. In the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used meters, though the Petrarchan sonnet has been used in Italy since the 14th century. Sonnets are particularly associated with love poetry, and often use a poetic diction heavily based on vivid imagery, but the twists and turns associated with the move from octave to sestet and to final couplet make them a useful and dynamic form for many subjects. Shakespeare's sonnets are among the most famous in English poetry, with 20 being included in the Oxford Book of English Verse. The relative prominence of a poet or set of works is often measured by reference to inclusion in the Oxford Book of English Verse or the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Jintishi

The jintishi (近體詩) is a Chinese poetic form based on a series of set tonal patterns using the four tones of Middle Chinese in each couplet: the level, rising, departing and entering tones. The basic form of the jintishi has eight lines in four couplets, with parallelism between the lines in the second and third couplets. The couplets with parallel lines contain contrasting content but an identical grammatical relationship between words. Jintishi often have a rich poetic diction, full of allusion, and can have a wide range of subject, including history and politics. One of the masters of the form was Du Fu, who wrote during the Tang Dynasty (8th century). There are several variations on the basic form of the jintishi.

Sestina

The sestina has six stanzas, each comprising six unrhymed lines, in which the words at the end of the first stanza’s lines reappear in a rolling pattern in the other stanzas. The poem then ends with a three-line stanza in which the words again appear, two on each line.

Villanelle

The Villanelle is a nineteen-line poem made up of five triplets with a closing quatrain; the poem is characterized by having two refrains, initially used in the first and third lines of the first stanza, and then alternately used at the close of each subsequent stanza until the final quatrain, which is concluded by the two refrains. The remaining lines of the poem have an a-b alternating rhyme. The villanelle has been used regularly in the English language since the late 19th century by such poets as Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop. It is a form that has gained increased use at a time when the use of received forms of poetry has generally been declining.

Pantoum

The pantoum is a rare form of poetry similar to a villanelle. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next.

Rondeau

The rondeau was originally a French form, written on two rhymes with fifteen lines, using the first part of the first line as a refrain.

Roundel

The roundel form, said to have been devised by Swinburne, consists of nine lines plus a refrain after the third line and after the last line, the refrain being identical with the beginning of the first line.

Tanka

Tanka is a form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, with five sections totalling 31 onji (phonological units identical to morae), structured in a 5-7-5 7-7 pattern. There is generally a shift in tone and subject matter between the upper 5-7-5 phrase and the lower 7-7 phrase. Tanka were written as early as the Nara period by such poets as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, at a time when Japan was emerging from a period where much of its poetry followed Chinese form. Tanka was originally the shorter form of Japanese formal poetry, and was used more heavily to explore personal rather than public themes. It thus had a more informal poetic diction. By the 13th century, tanka had become the dominant form of Japanese poetry, and it is still widely written today. The 31-mora rule is generally ignored by poets writing literary tanka in languages other than Japanese.

Haiku

Haiku is a popular form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, which evolved in the 17th century from the hokku, or opening verse of a renku. Generally written in a single vertical line, the haiku contains three sections totalling 17 onji (see above, at Tanka), structured in a 5-7-5 pattern. Traditionally, haiku contain (1) a kireji, or cutting word, usually placed at the end of one of the poem's three sections; and (2) a kigo, or season-word. The most famous exponent of the haiku was Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). An example of his writing: : :fuji no kaze ya oogi ni nosete Edo miyage

:the wind of Mt. Fuji :I've brought on my fan! :a gift from Edo

Ruba'i

Ruba'i is a four-line verse (quatrain) practiced by Arabian, Persian, Urdu, Azerbaijani (Azeri) poets. Famous for his rubaiyat (collection of quatrains) is the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. The most celebrated English renderings of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam were produced by Edward Fitzgerald; an example is given below:

:They say the Lion and the Lizard keep :The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: :And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass :Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

Sijo

Sijo is a short musical lyric practiced by Korean poets. It is usually written as three lines, each averaging 14-16 syllables, for a total of 44-46 syllables. There is a pause in the middle of each line and so, in English, a sijo is sometimes printed in six lines rather than three. An example is given below:

:You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine. :The moon rising over the eastern hill is a joyful comrade. :Besides these five companions, what other pleasure should I ask?

Ode

Odes were first developed by poets writing in ancient Greek, such as Pindar, and Latin, such as Horace. Forms of odes appear in many of the cultures that were influenced by the Greeks and Latins. The ode generally has three parts: a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode. The antistrophes of the ode possess similar metrical structures and, depending on the tradition, similar rhyme structures. In contrast, the epode is written with a different scheme and structure. Odes have a formal poetic diction, and generally deal with a serious subject. The strophe and antistrophe look at the subject from different, often conflicting, perspectives, with the epode moving to a higher level to either view or resolve the underlying issues. Odes are often intended to be recited or sung by two choruses (or individuals), with the first reciting the strophe, the second the antistrophe, and both together the epode. Over time, differing forms for odes have developed with considerable variations in form and structure, but generally showing the original influence of the Pindaric or Horatian ode. One non-Western form which resembles the ode is the qasida in Persian poetry.

Ghazal

ghazal poet Anwar Masood]] The ghazal (Arabic: ghazal, Persian: ghazel, Turkish/Azerbaijani: gazel, Urdu: gazal, Bengali/Sylheti: gozol) is a form of poetry common in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Urdu and Bengali poetry. In classic form, the ghazal has from five to fifteen rhyming couplets that share a refrain at the end of the second line. This refrain may be of one or several syllables, and is preceded by a rhyme. Each line has an identical meter. Each couplet forms a complete thought and stands alone, and the overall ghazal often reflects on a theme of unattainable love or divinity. The last couplet generally includes the signature of the author.

As with other forms with a long history in many languages, many variations have been developed, including forms with a quasi-musical poetic diction in Urdu. Ghazals have a classical affinity with Sufism, and a number of major Sufi religious works are written in ghazal form. The relatively steady meter and the use of the refrain produce an incantatory effect, which complements Sufi mystical themes well. Among the masters of the form is Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet who lived in Konya, in present-day Turkey.

Acrostic

An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichon, from ákros, "top", and stíchos, "verse") is a poem or other form of writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. A form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval.

A famous acrostic comes from the acclamation, "Jesus Christ, God's son, savior," which in Greek is: "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ", Iēsous Christos, Theou Huios, Sōtēr. The initial letters of each word spell ichthys, the Greek word for fish; hence the frequent use of the fish as a symbol for Jesus Christ.

The Jewish devotional prayer Ashrei has lines beginning with each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in turn, implying that Jews ought to praise God with each letter of the alphabet. Likewise, the prayer Ashamnu, recited on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), lists sins beginning with each letter of the alphabet, emphasizing the breadth and universality of wrongdoing.

Canzone

Literally "song" in Italian, a canzone (plural: canzoni) (cognate with English to chant) is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal. Sometimes a composition which is simple and songlike is designated as a canzone, especially if it is by a non-Italian; a good example is the aria "Voi che sapete" from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

Cinquain

While "quintain" is the general term applied to poetic forms using a 5-line pattern, there are specific forms within that category that are defined by specific rules and guidelines. The term "CINQUAIN" (pronounced SING-cane, the plural is "cinquains") as applied by modern poets most correctly refers to a form invented by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey. The first examples of these were published in 1915 in The Complete Poems, roughly a year after her death. Her cinquain form was inspired by Japanese haiku and Tanka (a form of Waka).

Other forms

Other forms of poetry include:

Carmina figurata

Concrete poetry: Word arrangement, typeface, color or other visual effects are used to complement or dramatize the meaning of the words used.

Fixed verse

Folk song

Free verse: based on the irregular rhythmic cadence or the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter.

Limerick

Minnesang

Murabba

Pastourelle

Poetry slam: This is a modern style of spoken word poetry, frequently associated with a distinctive style of delivery.

Stev

Yoik

Genres

In addition to specific forms of poems, poetry is often thought of in terms of different genres and subgenres. A poetic genre is generally a tradition or classification of poetry based on the subject matter, style, or other broader literary characteristics. Some commentators view genres as natural forms of literature. Others view the study of genres as the study of how different works relate and refer to other works.

Epic poetry is one commonly identified genre, often defined as lengthy poems concerning events of a heroic or important nature to the culture of the time. Lyric poetry, which tends to be shorter, melodic, and contemplative, is another commonly identified genre. Some commentators may organize bodies of poetry into further subgenres, and individual poems may be seen as a part of many different genres. In many cases, poetic genres show common features as a result of a common tradition, even across cultures.

Described below are some common genres, but the classification of genres, the description of their characteristics, and even the reasons for undertaking a classification into genres can take many forms.

Narrative poetry

Narrative poetry is a genre of poetry that tells a story. Broadly it subsumes epic poetry, but the term "narrative poetry" is often reserved for smaller works, generally with more appeal to human interest.

Narrative poetry may be the oldest type of poetry. Many scholars of Homer have concluded that his Iliad and Odyssey were composed from compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes and were more suitable for an evening's entertainment. Much narrative poetry—such as Scots and English ballads, and Baltic and Slavic heroic poems—is performance poetry with roots in a preliterate oral tradition. It has been speculated that some features that distinguish poetry from prose, such as meter, alliteration and kennings, once served as memory aids for bards who recited traditional tales.

Notable narrative poets have included Ovid, Dante, Juan Ruiz, Chaucer, William Langland, Luís de Camões, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Fernando de Rojas, Adam Mickiewicz, Alexander Pushkin, Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Tennyson.

Epic poetry

Epic poetry is a genre of poetry, and a major form of narrative literature. It recounts, in a continuous narrative, the life and works of a heroic or mythological person or group of persons. Examples of epic poems are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, the Nibelungenlied, Luís de Camões' Os Lusíadas, the Cantar de Mio Cid, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, Valmiki's Ramayana, Ferdowsi's Shahnama, Nizami (or Nezami)'s Khamse (Five Books), and the Epic of King Gesar.

While the composition of epic poetry, and of long poems generally, became less common in the west after the early 20th century, some notable epics have continued to be written. Derek Walcott won a Nobel prize to a great extent on the basis of his epic, Omeros.

Dramatic poetry

Dramatic poetry is drama written in verse to be spoken or sung, and appears in varying, sometimes related forms in many cultures. Verse drama may have developed out of earlier oral epics, such as the Sanskrit and Greek epics.

Greek tragedy in verse dates to the 6th century B.C., and may have been an influence on the development of Sanskrit drama, just as Indian drama in turn appears to have influenced the development of the bianwen verse dramas in China, forerunners of Chinese Opera. East Asian verse dramas also include Japanese Noh.

Examples of dramatic poetry in Persian literature include Nezami's two famous dramatic works, Layla and Majnun and Khosrow and Shirin, Ferdowsi's tragedies such as Rostam and Sohrab, Rumi's Masnavi, Gorgani's tragedy of Vis and Ramin, and Vahshi's tragedy of Farhad.

Satirical poetry

Poetry can be a powerful vehicle for satire. The punch of an insult delivered in verse can be many times more powerful and memorable than that of the same insult, spoken or written in prose. The Romans had a strong tradition of satirical poetry, often written for political purposes. A notable example is the Roman poet Juvenal's satires, whose insults stung the entire spectrum of society.

The same is true of the English satirical tradition. Embroiled in the feverish politics of the time and stung by an attack on him by his former friend, Thomas Shadwell (a Whig), John Dryden (a Tory), the first Poet Laureate, produced in 1682 Mac Flecknoe, one of the greatest pieces of sustained invective in the English language, subtitled "A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S." In this, the late, notably mediocre poet, Richard Flecknoe, was imagined to be contemplating who should succeed him as ruler "of all the realms of Nonsense absolute" to "reign and wage immortal war on wit."

Another master of 17th-century English satirical poetry was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. He was known for ruthless satires such as "A Satyr Against Mankind" (1675) and a "A Satyr on Charles II."

Another exemplar of English satirical poetry was Alexander Pope, who famously chided critics in his Essay on Criticism (1709). Dryden and Pope were writers of epic poetry, and their satirical style was accordingly epic; but there is no prescribed form for satirical poetry.

The greatest satirical poets outside England include Poland's Ignacy Krasicki, Azerbaijan's Sabir and Portugal's Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, commonly known as Bocage.

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is a genre that, unlike epic poetry and dramatic poetry, does not attempt to tell a story but instead is of a more personal nature. Rather than depicting characters and actions, it portrays the poet's own feelings, states of mind, and perceptions. While the genre's name, derived from "lyre", implies that it is intended to be sung, much lyric poetry is meant purely for reading.

Though lyric poetry has long celebrated love, many courtly-love poets also wrote lyric poems about war and peace, nature and nostalgia, grief and loss. Notable among these are the 15th century French lyric poets, Christine de Pizan and Charles, Duke of Orléans. Spiritual and religious themes were addressed by such mystic lyric poets as St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila. The tradition of lyric poetry based on spiritual experience was continued by later poets such as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Antonio Machado and T. S. Eliot.

Though the most popular form for western lyric poetry to take may be the 14-line sonnet, as practiced by Petrarch and Shakespeare, lyric poetry shows a bewildering variety of forms, including increasingly, in the 20th century, unrhymed ones. Lyric poetry is the most common type of poetry, as it deals intricately with an author's own emotions and views.

Elegy

An elegy is a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem, especially a lament for the dead or a funeral song. The term "elegy," which originally denoted a type of poetic meter (elegiac meter), commonly describes a poem of mourning. An elegy may also reflect something that seems to the author to be strange or mysterious. The elegy, as a reflection on a death, on a sorrow more generally, or on something mysterious, may be classified as a form of lyric poetry. In a related sense that harks back to ancient poetic traditions of sung poetry, the word "elegy" may also denote a type of musical work, usually of a sad or somber nature.

Elegiac poetry has been written since antiquity. Perhaps the first example of the form is II Samuel, Chapter 1, in which David laments the fall of King Saul and of Saul's son and heir Jonathan. Notable practitioners have included Propertius (lived ca. 50 BCE – ca. 15 BCE), Jorge Manrique (1476), Jan Kochanowski (1580), Chidiock Tichborne (1586), Edmund Spenser (1595), Ben Jonson (1616), John Milton (1637), Thomas Gray (1750), Charlotte Turner Smith (1784), William Cullen Bryant (1817), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1823), Evgeny Baratynsky (1837), Alfred Tennyson (1849), Walt Whitman (1865), Louis Gallet (lived 1835–98), Antonio Machado (1903), Juan Ramón Jiménez (1914), William Butler Yeats (1916), Rainer Maria Rilke (1922), Virginia Woolf (1927), Federico García Lorca (1935), Kamau Brathwaite (born 1930).

Verse fable

The fable is an ancient, near-ubiquitous literary genre, often (though not invariably) set in verse. It is a succinct story that features anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that illustrate a moral lesson (a "moral"). Verse fables have used a variety of meter and rhyme patterns; Ignacy Krasicki, for example, in his Fables and Parables, used 13-syllable lines in rhyming couplets.

Notable verse fabulists have included Aesop (mid-6th century BCE), Vishnu Sarma (ca. 200 BCE), Phaedrus (15 BCE–50 CE), Marie de France (12th century), Robert Henryson (fl.1470-1500), Biernat of Lublin (1465?–after 1529), Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95), Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801), Félix María de Samaniego (1745–1801), Tomás de Iriarte (1750–1791), Ivan Krylov (1769–1844) and Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914). All of Aesop's translators and successors owe a debt to that semi-legendary fabulist.

An example of a verse fable is Krasicki's "The Lamb and the Wolves": :Aggression ever finds cause if sufficiently pressed. :Two wolves on the prowl had trapped a lamb in the forest :And were about to pounce. Quoth the lamb: "What right have you?" :"You're toothsome, weak, in the wood." — The wolves dined sans ado.

Prose poetry

, by Gustave Courbet]] Prose poetry is a hybrid genre that shows attributes of both prose and poetry. It may be indistinguishable from the micro-story ( the "short short story", "flash fiction"). It qualifies as poetry because of its conciseness, use of metaphor, and special attention to language.

While some examples of earlier prose strike modern readers as poetic, prose poetry is commonly regarded as having originated in 19th-century France, where its practitioners included Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.

The genre has subsequently found notable exemplars in various languages:

Bengali: Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore

English: Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Giannina Braschi, Seamus Heaney, Russell Edson, Robert Bly, Charles Simic, Joseph Conrad

French: Max Jacob, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, Jean-Pierre Vallotton.

Greek: Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos

Italian: Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba

Polish: Bolesław Prus, Zbigniew Herbert

Portuguese: Fernando Pessoa, Mário Cesariny, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Walter Solon, Eugénio de Andrade, Al Berto, Alexandre O'Neill, José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes

Russian: Ivan Turgenev, Regina Derieva, Anatoly Kudryavitsky

Spanish: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Octavio Paz, Giannina Braschi, Ángel Crespo, Julio Cortázar, Ruben Dario, Oliverio Girondo, Aníbal Cristobo.

Swedish: Tomas Tranströmer

Sindhi language: Narin Shiam, Hari Dilgeer, Tanyir Abasi, Saikh Ayaz, Mukhtiar Malik, Taj Joyo

Punjabi language: Ali Arman

Urdu language: Ali Arman

Since the late 1980s especially, prose poetry has gained increasing popularity, with entire journals devoted solely to that genre.

See also

Poetry terminology

Notes

References

Anthologies

Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter & Jon Stallworthy (Eds). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (4th ed, 1996), ISBN 0-393-96820-0.

Helen Gardner (Ed). New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950. New York, New York and London, England: Oxford University Press, (1972), ISBN 0-19-812136-9.

Donald Hall (Ed). ''New Poets of England and America. New York, New York: Meridian Press, (1957).

Philip Larkin (Ed). The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. New York, New York and London, England: Oxford University Press, (1973)

James Laughlin (Ed). New Directions in Prose and Poetry Annuals. Norfolk, Connecticut and New York, New York: New Directions Publications (1936–1991).

Arthur Quiller-Couch (Ed). Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford University Press, (1900).

W.B. Yeats (Ed). Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Oxford University Press, (1936)

Scansion and form

Alfred Corn. The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. London, England: Storyline Press (1997), ISBN 1-885266-40-5.

Annie Finch. A Poet's Ear: A Handbook of Meter and Form. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (2011).

Stephen Fry. . London: Arrow Books (2007).

Paul Fussell. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York, New York: Random House (1965).

John Hollander. Rhyme's Reason (3rd ed). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press (2001).

James McAuley. Versification, A Short Introduction. Michigan State University Press (1983), ISBN B0007DTS8K

Robert Pinsky. The Sounds of Poetry (1998).

Criticism and history

Cleanth Brooks. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, (1947).

William K. Wimsatt, Jr. & Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York, New York: Vintage Books, (1957).

T. S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London, England: Methuen Publishing, Ltd., (1920).

George Gascoigne. Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of English Verse or Ryme Stormloader.com.

Ezra Pound. ABC of Reading. London, England: Faber, (1951).

Władysław Tatarkiewicz. "The Concept of Poetry," translated by Christopher Kasparek, Dialectics and Humanism: the Polish Philosophical Quarterly, vol. II, no. 2 (spring 1975), pp. 13–24.

John Thompson. The Founding of English Meter. New York, New York: Columbia University Press (1961).

Language

Zhiming Bao. The Structure of Tone. New York, New York: Oxford University Press (1999) ISBN 0-19-511880-4.

Morio Kono. "Perception and Psychology of Rhythm" in Accent, Intonation, Rhythm and Pause. (1997).

Moira Yip. Tone. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002) ISBN 0-521-77314-8 (hbk), ISBN 0-521-77445-4 (pbk).

Other

Alex Preminger, Terry V.F. Brogan and Frank J. Warnke (Eds). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (3rd Ed.). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-02123-6.

Hamid R. Tizhoosh, Farhang Sahba, Rozita Dara Poetic Features for Poem Recognition: A Comparative Study Journal of Pattern Recognition Research, (JPRR.org) Vol 3 (1) 2008.

Category:Aesthetics Category:Genres Category:Linguistics Category:Literature Category:Methods of writing * Category:Spoken word Category:Greek loanwords

Coordinates	52°52′36″N21°5′43″N
Name	Tim Minchin
Birth name	Timothy David Minchin
Birth date	October 07, 1975
Birth place	Northampton, England (born 7 October 1975 in Northampton, UK) is a British born Australian comedian, actor, and musician.
Name	Minchin, Tim
Date of birth	October 7, 1975
Place of birth	Perth, Australia

Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:Australian comedians Category:British comedians Category:Comedy musicians Category:Australian stand-up comedians Category:Australian atheists Category:University of Western Australia alumni Category:Former students of Christ Church Grammar School

Coordinates	52°52′36″N21°5′43″N
Name	Johnny Carson
Caption	Carson in January 1966
Birth name	John William Carson
Birth date	October 23, 1925
Birth place	Corning, Iowa
Death date	January 23, 2005
Death place	Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Active	1950–1994
Signature	Johnny Carson Signature.svg
Influences	Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Laurel and Hardy, Red Skelton, George Burns, Milton Berle
Influenced	Ray Combs, Ellen DeGeneres, Kathy Griffin, Bill Hicks, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Bill Maher, Conan O'Brien, Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling
Spouse	Joan Morrill Wolcott (1949–1963)Joanne Copeland (1963–1972)Joanna Holland (1972–1985)Alexandra Mass (1987–2005)
Notable work	Host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

}} John William “Johnny” Carson (October 23, 1925 – January 23, 2005) was an American television host and comedian, known as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for 30 years (1962–1992). Carson received six Emmy Awards including the Governor Award and a 1985 Peabody Award; he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992, and received Kennedy Center Honors in 1993.

Although his show was already hugely successful by the end of the 1960s, it was during the 1970s that he became an American icon and the "best guest" in American homes up until his retirement in 1992. Carson is credited with molding modern television late night talk shows, transitioning the format from Ed Sullivan's era of post-war vaudeville-derived variety where the host was merely an announcer of acts, to today's more casual, conversational approach with extensive interaction with guests. Late night hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson and Jimmy Fallon have all cited Carson's influence on their late night talk shows, which greatly resemble Carson's show in format and tone.

Early life and career

Born in Corning, Iowa, on October 23, 1925 Carson lived in the nearby Iowa towns of Avoca, Clarinda, and Red Oak before later moving to Norfolk, Nebraska. He left college after one year to join the United States Navy, being commissioned an Ensign. He joined the U.S. Navy on June 8, 1943, as an apprentice seaman enrolled in the V-12 program, which trained Navy and Marine pilots. He hoped to train as a pilot, but was sent instead to Columbia University for midshipman training. He performed magic for classmates on the side. Commissioned an ensign late in the war, Carson was assigned to the USS Pennsylvania, a battleship on station in the Pacific. He was en route to the combat zone aboard a troopship when the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a close.

The Pennsylvania was torpedoed on August 12, 1945 and Carson reported for duty on August 14 — the last day of the war. Although he arrived too late for combat, he got a firsthand education in the consequences of war. The damaged warship sailed to Guam for repairs, and as the newest and most junior officer, Carson was assigned to supervise the removal of 20 dead sailors. He later served as a communications officer in charge of decoding encrypted messages. He recalls that the high point of his military career was performing a magic trick for United States Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal.

He began his performing career in 1950 at WOW radio and television in Omaha, Nebraska. He appeared on radio with Ken Case, an Omaha native who was later a news anchor and sportscaster in Monroe, Louisiana. Carson soon hosted a morning television program called The Squirrel's Nest. One of his routines involved interviewing pigeons on the roof of the local courthouse that would allegedly report on the political corruption they had seen. Carson supplemented his income by serving as master of ceremonies at local church dinners, attended by some of the same politicians and civic leaders that he had lampooned on the radio. The wife of one of the political figures owned stock in a radio station in Los Angeles and referred Carson to her brother, who was influential in the emerging television market in Southern California. Carson went to work at CBS-owned Los Angeles television station KNXT. He would later joke that he owed his success to the birds of Omaha.

In 1953, comic Red Skelton — a fan of Carson's sketch comedy show Carson's Cellar, which appeared from 1951 to 1953 on KNXT — asked Carson to join his show as a writer. Skelton once accidentally knocked himself unconscious an hour before his show went on the air live. Carson filled in for him.

In 1955, Jack Benny invited Carson to appear on one of his programs, during the opening and closing segments. Carson imitated Benny and claimed that Benny had copied his gestures. Benny, however, predicted that Carson would have a successful career as a comedian.

Carson hosted several shows before The Tonight Show, including the game show Earn Your Vacation (1954), and the variety show The Johnny Carson Show (1955–1956). He was a regular panelist on the original To Tell the Truth until 1962. After the prime time The Johnny Carson Show failed, he moved to New York City to host Who Do You Trust? (1957–1962), formerly known as Do You Trust Your Wife?. In 1958, he appeared as a guest star in an episode entitled "Do You Trust Your Wife" on NBC's short-lived variety show, The Polly Bergen Show. It was on Who Do You Trust? that Carson met his future sidekick, Ed McMahon. Although he saw moving to daytime as hurting his career, Who Do You Trust? was a success. It was the first show where he could ad lib and interview guests.

The Tonight Show

Carson's success on Who Do You Trust? led NBC to invite him to replace Jack Paar as host of The Tonight Show, who would leave in March 1962. Carson declined the offer, but NBC asked him again after Bob Newhart, Jackie Gleason, and Joey Bishop also refused. Carson accepted in March, but had six months left on his CBS contract, during which NBC used many guest hosts including Merv Griffin.

Although he continued to have doubts about his new job, Carson became host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in October 1962 and quickly overcame his fears. His announcer and sidekick was Ed McMahon throughout the program. McMahon's opening line, "Heeeere's Johnny" became a hallmark. Most of the later shows began with music and the announcement "Heeeeeere's Johnny!", followed by a brief monologue by Carson. This was often followed by comedy sketches, interviews, and music. Carson's trademark was a phantom golf swing at the end of his monologues, aimed stage left where the Tonight Show Band was. Guest hosts sometimes parodied that gesture. Bob Newhart rolled an imaginary bowling ball toward the audience. Johnny enjoyed what he calls the "Carson Kits," or beautiful girls to dress his show. Theona Bryant, a favorite, was a model. The other "Carson Cuties" were Phyllis Applegate, Norma Brooks, and Sally Todd.

Paul Anka wrote the theme song ("Johnny's Theme"), a reworking of his "Toot Sweet", given lyrics, renamed "It's Really Love," and recorded by Annette Funicello in 1959. Anka gave Carson co-authorship and they split the royalties for three decades.

The show was originally produced in New York City, with occasional stints in California. It was not live in its early years, although during the 1970s, NBC fed the live taping from Burbank to New York via satellite for editing (see below). The program had been done "live on tape" (uninterrupted unless a problem occurred) since the Jack Paar days.

Move to Burbank

In May 1972, the show moved from New York to Burbank, California. Carson often joked about "beautiful downtown Burbank" and referred to "beautiful downtown Bakersfield," which prompted Mayor Mary K. Shell to chide Carson and invite him to her city to see improvements made during the early 1980s.

After July 1971, Carson stopped doing shows five days a week. Instead, on Monday nights there was a guest host, leaving Carson to do the other four each week. Shows were taped in Burbank at 5:30pm (8:30 pm Eastern time) to be shown that evening at 11:30pm Eastern time. On September 8, 1980, at Carson's request, the show cut its 90-minute format to 60 minutes; Tom Snyder's Tomorrow added a half hour to fill the vacant time. Joan Rivers became the "permanent" guest host from September 1983 until 1986, when she was fired for accepting a competing show on Fox without consulting Carson. The Tonight Show returned to using rotating guest hosts, including comic George Carlin. Jay Leno then became the exclusive guest host in fall 1987. Leno stated that although other guest hosts upped their fees, he kept his low, assuring himself the show. Eventually, Monday night was for Leno, Tuesday for the Best of Carson, rebroadcasts usually of a year earlier but occasionally from the 1970s.

Carson had a talent for quick quips to deal with problems. If the opening monologue fared poorly, the band would start playing "Tea for Two" and Carson danced, to laughs from the studio audience. Alternately, Carson might pull the boom mic close to his face and announce "Attention K-Mart shoppers!"

Carson's show was the launch for many performers, notably comedians. Many got their break on the show, and it was an achievement to get Carson to laugh and be called to the guest chair. Carson was successor to The Ed Sullivan Show as a showcase for all kinds of talent, as well as continuing a vaudeville-style variety show.

In 1973, Carson had a run-in with psychic Uri Geller. Carson, a magician, wanted a neutral demonstration of Geller's abilities, so, at the advice of his friend and fellow magician James Randi, he gave Geller spoons and asked him to bend them with his psychic powers. Geller proved unable, and his appearance on The Tonight Show has been regarded as Geller's fall from glory.

Carson successfully sued a manufacturer of portable toilets who wanted to call its product "Here's Johnny".

Carson and Don Rickles

On December 13, 1976, comedian Don Rickles was a guest when comedian Bob Newhart guest-hosted. While poking fun at Newhart and improvising an "immigration" bit, Rickles stamped an imaginary passport, slamming the cigarette box Carson kept on his desk and breaking it. When Carson returned the next night and discovered this, he took a camera crew to the studio next door where CPO Sharkey, a sitcom starring Rickles, was being taped. Carson barged into the studio, shouting, "RICKLES!" He disrupted the taping, berating the embarrassed Rickles with a barrage of insults, in imitation of Rickles's act. Carson also teased CPO Sharkey's African-American actor Harrison Page by speaking to him in an exaggerated southern dialect.

Dolly Parton

However, a bit of adult humor was not beyond Carson. During an interview with Dolly Parton, in reference to her large bust, she said, "People are always asking if they're real and ... I'll tell you what, these are mine." Carson replied, "I have certain guidelines on this show. But I would give about a year's pay to peek under there." Videotape of the Parton interview survives and has been rebroadcast several times during Tonight Show retrospectives.

Rolling Stone controversy

In a 1980 Rolling Stone article, Carson caused quite a public backlash when he called the Brian Wilson-penned (Beach Boys) song "Johnny Carson" from 1977's Love You album "not a work of art". Wilson wrote the song tribute citing the fact no such song had existed previously about the 'king of late night'.

Feuds

Carson made several routine jokes at the expense of other celebrities, like Wayne Newton (after Newton had performed on Carson's show several times). Newton claimed in his 1991 autobiography, among other times including a 1989 interview with Phil Donahue, that the circumstances led to a confrontation in Carson's dressing room where Newton threatened a physical altercation if Carson didn't cease the barrage of jokes with homosexual connotations. In a November 29, 2007 interview on Larry King Live, Wayne Newton said, "I'm going to say something I've never said on television, Mr. King. Johnny Carson was a mean-spirited human being. And there are people that he has hurt that people will never know about. And for some reason at some point, he decided to turn that kind of negative attention toward me. And I refused to have it."

Another famous feud came on the heels of an appearance by author Truman Capote in 1966. The diminutive writer was already embroiled in a public feud with fellow novelist Jacqueline Susann when he told Johnny — and millions of viewers — that Susann looked "like a truck driver in drag." The remark was not censored from the broadcast, and made headlines the next day. Capote subsequently issued a public apology — to truck drivers.

Carson reportedly loathed what he felt was disloyalty among friends. The comedian was displeased when former "Tonight Show" guest hosts John Davidson and Joan Rivers got their own talk shows. Rivers' FOX show directly competed with Carson during the 1986-1987 season, and died a quick death. On June 24, 2009 following Ed McMahon's death, Rivers lauded McMahon on "Larry King Live" but stated that Carson "never again spoke to me, up to his death". Another guest host, Jay Leno, was treated coolly for being perceived as ushering Carson into retirement. Leno's agent ignited the then-false rumor in Hollywood circles that Carson's retirement was pending, and Leno was heir to the "Tonight Show". Carson vowed not to return to the show while Leno headed it, and indeed would make his final TV appearance about a year after his retirement on the competing Late Show with David Letterman.

Some of Carson's good-natured barbs were directed at his friends. Ronald Reagan's hair and Frank Sinatra's temper and mob connections were frequent topics. Carson humorously chided Nancy Reagan for falling down and "breaking her hair."

Comic characters

Carson played several continuing characters on sketches during the show, including

Art Fern, the "Tea Time Movie" announcer (always selling strange or shoddy merchandise). The character was based on late-show TV hosts who would deliver commercials throughout the movie. Carson originally played the fast-talking huckster in his own voice (as Honest Bernie Schlock or Ralph Willie), and finally settled on a nasal, high-pitched, smarmy drone reminiscent of Jackie Gleason's "Reginald Van Gleason III" character. The character, now permanently known as Art Fern, wore a lavish toupee, loud jackets, and a pencil mustache. Actress Carol Wayne became famous for her 100-plus appearances (1971–1982) as Art's buxom assistant, the Matinée Lady. While Art gave his spiel, she would enter the stage behind him. Art would react to her attractive body, wincing loudly, "Ho — leeeee!" After Carol Wayne's death in 1985, Carson kept Art Fern off the air for most of the next year, and finally hired Danuta Wesley and then Teresa Ganzel to play the Matinée Lady. Carson also used these sketches to poke fun at the intricate Los Angeles interstate system, using a pointer and map to give confusing directions to shoppers (often including points where he would unfold the cardboard map to point out, via the appropriate picture, when the shopper would arrive at "the fork in the road." Another freeway routine in the same theme centered around the fictional "Slauson Cutoff." Art Fern would advise drivers to take a series of freeways until they reached the Slauson Cutoff, and would then advise them to "Get out of your car, cut off your slauson, get back in your car," often followed by peals of laughter from the audience, led by McMahon.

Carnac the Magnificent, a turbaned psychic who could answer questions before seeing them. (This same routine had been done by Carson's predecessor, Steve Allen, as "The Question Man.") Carnac had a trademark entrance in which he always turned the wrong direction when coming onto stage and then "tripped" on the step up to Carson's desk. (In one episode, technicians rigged Carson's desk to fall apart when Carnac fell into it.) These comedic missteps were an indication of Carnac's true prescient abilities. Ed McMahon would hand Carnac a series of envelopes, containing questions. Carnac would place each envelope against his forehead and predict the answer, such as "Gatorade." Then he would read the question: "What does an alligator get on welfare?" Some of the jokes were feeble, and McMahon used pauses after terrible puns and audience groans to make light of Carnac's lack of comic success ("Carnac must be used to quiet surroundings"), prompting Carson to return an equal insult. McMahon would always announce near the end, "I hold in my hand the last envelope," at which the audience would applaud wildly, prompting Carnac to pronounce a comedic "curse" on the audience, such as "May your sister elope with a camel!" (In fact, "Carnac the Magnificent" was the stage name Johnny used in his magic act as a youth.)

Floyd R. Turbo American (with no pause between words). A stereotypical redneck wearing a plaid hunting coat and cap, who offered "editorial responses" to left-leaning causes or news events. Railing against women's rights in the workplace, for example, Turbo would shout, "This raises the question: kiss my Dictaphone!"

Aunt Blabby, a cantankerous and sometimes amorous old lady, invariably being interviewed by straight man Ed McMahon about elder affairs. McMahon would innocently use a common expression like "check out," only to have Aunt Blabby warn him, "Don't say 'check out' to an old person!" Aunt Blabby was an obvious copy of Jonathan Winters’ most famous creation, Maude Frickert, including her black spinster dress and wig.

El Mouldo, a mentalist, who would attempt to perform mind-reading and mind-over-matter feats, all of which failed. Often his tricks would include an attempt to bilk money from Ed McMahon or would end with him begging for money.

Carson uncensored on satellite

Even though Carson's program was based in Burbank, NBC's editing and production services for the program were located in New York, resulting in the requirement that Carson's program be transmitted from Burbank to New York. Beginning in 1976, NBC used the Satcom 2 satellite to do this, feeding the live taping (which usually took place in the early evening) directly to New York, where it would be edited prior to the normal broadcast. This live feed lasted usually from two to two-and-a-half hours a night, and was uncensored and commercial-free. During the commercial breaks the audio and picture would be left on, capturing at times risque language and other events that would certainly be edited out later going out over the feed.

At the same time, however, satellite ground stations owned by private individuals began to appear, and some managed to find the live feed. Satellite dish owners began to document their sightings in technical journals, giving viewers knowledge of things they were not meant to see. Carson and his production staff grew concerned about this, and pressured NBC into ceasing the satellite transmissions of the live taping in the early 1980s. The satellite link was replaced by microwave landline transmission until the show's editing facilities were finally moved to Burbank.

Business ventures

Carson was a major investor in the ultimately failed DeLorean Motor Company. Founder John DeLorean was involved in a drug scandal, causing Carson's guest Red Skelton to quip, "The DeLorean, is that a hopped-up car?"

Carson was head of a group of show business people and businessmen who purchased and operated two television stations — channel 5 KVVU-TV in Henderson, Nevada, serving Las Vegas, now owned by Meredith Broadcasting, and channel 23 KNAT in Albuquerque, New Mexico. KVVU had been the earliest Las Vegas independent station and was sort of a local in-joke for its threadbare operation and ragtag program lineup. Many thought it ironic that a leading entertainer like Carson, along with Sal Durante, Neil Simon and others, would own such a station. There was talk at the time that the station would become the NBC affiliate, as then long-time affiliate KORK-TV was in the process of being replaced by KVBC-TV, but it never happened. KNAT started at exactly the wrong time. Several new channels — 2, 9, 11, 14, and 23 — were starting up in the southwest and the competition for good syndicated shows was fierce. KNAT was later sold to Trinity Broadcasting.

Carson's other business ventures included a successful clothing line, through which his turtlenecks became a fashion trend, and a failed restaurant franchise.

Retirement

Carson retired from show business on May 22, 1992, when he stepped down as host of The Tonight Show. His farewell was a major media event, and stretched over several nights. It was often emotional for Carson, his colleagues, and the audiences, particularly the farewell statement he delivered on his 4,531st and final Tonight Show:

NBC gave the role of host to the show's then-current permanent guest host, Jay Leno. Leno and David Letterman were soon competing on separate networks.

Post-retirement appearances

in 1992]] At the end of his final Tonight Show appearance, Carson indicated that he might, if so inspired, return with a new project, but instead chose to go into full retirement, rarely giving interviews and declining to participate in NBC's 75th Anniversary celebrations. He made the occasional cameo appearance, including voicing himself on a 1993 episode of The Simpsons ("Krusty Gets Kancelled"), telephoning David Letterman on a November 1993 episode of Late Show with David Letterman, and appearing in the 1993 NBC Special Bob Hope: The First 90 Years. On May 13, 1994, Carson appeared on Late Show with David Letterman. During a week of shows from Los Angeles, Letterman was having Larry "Bud" Melman (Calvert DeForest) deliver his "Top Ten Lists" under the guise that a famous personality would be delivering the list instead. On the last show of the week, Letterman indicated that Carson would be delivering the list. Instead, DeForest delivered the list, insulted the audience (in keeping with the gag), and walked off to polite applause. Letterman then indicated that the card he was given did not have the proper list on it and asked that the "real" list be brought out. On that cue, the real Johnny Carson emerged from behind the curtain (as Letterman's band played "Johnny's Theme"), an appearance which prompted a standing ovation from the audience. Carson then requested to sit behind Letterman's desk; Letterman obliged, as the audience continued to cheer and applaud. After some moments, Carson departed from the show without having spoken to the audience. He later cited acute laryngitis as the reason for his silence. This night turned out to be Carson's last television appearance.

Letterman

Just days before Carson's death, it was revealed that the retired "King of Late Night" occasionally sent jokes to Letterman. Letterman would then use these jokes in the monologue of his show, which Carson got "a big kick out of" according to Worldwide Pants, Inc., Senior Vice-President Peter Lassally, who formerly produced both men's programs; he also claimed that Carson had always believed Letterman, not Leno, to be his "rightful successor". Letterman frequently employs some of Carson's trademark bits on his show, including "Carnac" (with band leader Paul Shaffer as Carnac), "Stump the Band," and the "Week in Review."

Personal life

Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, to Homer "Kit" Lloyd Carson, a power company manager, and Ruth Hook Carson. He grew up in southwest Iowa until the age of 8, when the family moved to Norfolk, Nebraska. There he learned to perform magic tricks, debuting as "The Great Carsoni" at 14. He attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he received V-12 officer training, and then served in the Navy from 1943-1946. He served in USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) in the final days of the war. Carson then attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln where he joined Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, wrote a thesis on the structure of Jack Benny's comedy routines, and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in radio and speech with a minor in physics in 1949.

Despite his on-camera demeanor, Carson was very shy off-camera. He was referred to as "the most private public man who ever lived". Dick Cavett recalled that "I felt sorry for Johnny in that he was so socially uncomfortable. I've hardly ever met anybody who had as hard a time as he did."

Marriages

In 1954, Carson married his high school sweetheart Joan. The marriage was volatile, with infidelities by both parties, finally ending in divorce. They had three sons. Their son Richard died in a car accident on June 21, 1991. Another son, Cory, worked as a stage manager at NBC in Burbank.

In 1963, Carson got a "quickie" Mexican divorce from Joan and married Joanne Copeland on August 17, 1963. After a protracted divorce in 1972, Copeland received nearly half a million dollars in cash and art and US$100,000 a year in alimony for life.

Joanne Copeland recently discovered 39 episodes of the debut season of The Johnny Carson Show which were originally telecast in 1955 and 1956. She then made an arrangement with Shout! Factory to produce and distribute selected programs on DVD. The two-disk DVD set contains Johnny's "top 10" episodes. Johnny's first wife Joan and the couple's three sons appear in the first episode on the DVD.

At the Carson Tonight Show's 10th anniversary party on September 30, 1972, Carson announced that he and former model Joanna Holland had been secretly married that afternoon, shocking his friends and associates. Carson kidded that he had married three similarly named women to avoid "having to change the monogram on the towels." A similar joke was made by Bob Newhart during Carson's roast by Dean Martin. On March 8, 1983, Holland filed for divorce. Under California's community property laws, she was entitled to 50 percent of all the assets accumulated during the marriage, even though Carson earned virtually 100 percent of the couple's income. During this period, he joked on The Tonight Show, "My producer, Freddy de Cordova, really gave me something I needed for Christmas. He gave me a gift certificate to the Law Offices of Jacoby & Meyers." The divorce case finally ended in 1985 with an 80-page settlement, Holland receiving $20 million in cash and property.

Carson married Alexandra Mass on June 20, 1987; Johnny was 61, Alexis 35.

Children

Carson's son from his first marriage, Richard, died on June 21, 1991, when his car plunged down a steep embankment along a paved service road off Highway 1 near Cayucos, a small town north of San Luis Obispo, California. Apparently, Richard had been taking photographs when the accident occurred. Carson was deeply shaken by his son's death. On his first show after Ricky's death, he gave a stirring tribute in the final minutes of his show as samples of his son's photographic work (and images of Ricky, himself) were displayed with the music accompaniment of Riviera Paradise by blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. In addition, the final image — as well as some "More To Come" bumpers — of Carson's last show that aired May 22, 1992 featured a photo Richard had taken.

Donations

In 1981, Carson created the John W. Carson Foundation, dedicated to supporting children, education and health services. The Foundation continues to support charitable causes.

In November 2004, Carson announced a $5.3 million gift to the University of Nebraska Foundation to support the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts' Department of Theatre Arts, which created the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film. Another $5 million donation was announced by the estate of Carson to the University of Nebraska following his death.

Carson also donated to causes in his hometown of Norfolk, including the Carson Cancer Center at Faith Regional Health Services, the Elkhorn Valley Museum, and the Johnny Carson Theater at Norfolk Senior High School.

In August 2010, the charitable foundation created by Johnny Carson reported receiving $156 million from a personal trust established by the entertainer years prior to his January 2005 death. Carson's foundation was now by far the biggest of Hollywood charities. (from Smoking Gun )

Other events

Carson, an amateur astronomer, was close friends with astronomer Carl Sagan, who often appeared on The Tonight Show. The unique way Sagan had of saying certain words, like "billions" of galaxies, would lead to Carson ribbing his friend, imitating his voice and saying "BILL-ions and BILL-ions", a phrase erroneously attributed to Sagan. Carson was the first person to contact Sagan's wife with condolences when the scientist died in 1996. He owned several telescopes, including a Questar, considered at the time a top-of-the line telescope.

Also an amateur drummer, Carson was shown on a segment of 60 Minutes practicing at home on a drum set given to him by close friend Buddy Rich, who was the jazz musician with the most appearances on The Tonight Show. Writer Gore Vidal, another frequent Tonight Show guest and friend, writes about Carson's personality in his 2006 memoirs.

Death and tributes

On March 19, 1999, Carson, then 73, suffered a severe heart attack at his home in Malibu, California. Carson was sleeping when he suddenly awoke with severe chest pains. He was rushed to a hospital in nearby Santa Monica where he underwent quadruple-bypass surgery.

At 6:50 AM PST on January 23, 2005, Carson died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, of respiratory arrest arising from emphysema. He was 79 years old. Carson had revealed his illness to the public in September 2002. Following Carson's death his body was cremated, and the ashes were given to his wife. In accordance with his family's wishes, no public memorial service was held. There were numerous tributes paid to Carson upon his death, including a statement by then President George W. Bush, recognizing the deep and enduring affection held for him.

On January 24, 2005, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno paid tribute to Carson with guests Ed McMahon, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Drew Carey and k.d. lang. Letterman followed suit on January 31 with former Tonight Show executive producer Peter Lassally and bandleader Doc Severinsen. During the beginning of this show, Letterman said that for 30 years no matter what was going on in the world, no matter whether people had a good or bad day, they wanted to end the day by being "tucked in by Johnny." Letterman also told his viewers that the monologue he had just given had consisted entirely of jokes sent to him by Carson in the last few months of his life. Doc Severinsen ended the Letterman show that night by playing one of Carson's two favorite songs, "Here's That Rainy Day" (the other was "I'll Be Seeing You"). It had been reported over the decades of Carson's fame that he was, off-camera, so intensely private that he had never once invited McMahon to his home. After Carson's death, though, McMahon disputed those rumors and claimed that a close friendship existed. On his final Tonight Show appearance, Carson himself said that while sometimes people who work together for long stretches of time on television don't necessarily like each other, this was not the case with him and McMahon: They were good friends who would have dinner together, and the camaraderie that they had on the show could not be faked. Carson and McMahon were friends for 30 years.

A week or so after the tributes, Dennis Miller was on the Tonight Show and told Jay Leno about the first time he tried to host a talk show, and how miserably it went. He said that he got a call immediately after the first show, from Carson, telling him, "It's not as easy as it looks, is it, kid?"

The 2005 film The Aristocrats was dedicated to Carson, as well as The Simpsons episode Mommie Beerest.

References

Further reading

Accounts on work and life

Humor material collections

Johnny Carson Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

External links

Official website for The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson

at Salon at The New Republic

1978 profile from The New Yorker by Kenneth Tynan

The Johnny Carson Show from USA Today

Johnny Carson biography at FilmReference.com

Posthumous Letter to Carson from Steve Martin published in The New York Times

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Johnny Carson Singing with the Ratpack in 1965 YouTube Video

Obituaries

CNN obituary

MSNBC obituary

Johnny Carson obituary by James Wolcott

Category:1925 births Category:2005 deaths Category:American game show hosts Category:American skeptics Category:American stand-up comedians Category:American television talk show hosts Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:Deaths from emphysema Category:Disease-related deaths in California Category:Entertainers from Nebraska Category:University of Nebraska–Lincoln alumni Category:United States Navy officers Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Peabody Award winners Category:People from Adams County, Iowa

Coordinates	52°52′36″N21°5′43″N
Name	James Stewart
Caption	Stewart, Donna Reed and Karolyn Grimes in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Birth name	James Maitland Stewart
Birth date	May 20, 1908
Birth place	Indiana, Pennsylvania, United States
Death date	July 02, 1997
Death place	Los Angeles, California, United States
Other names	Jimmy Stewart
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1933–1991
Spouse	Gloria Hatrick (1949–1994) (her death) 2 children

}}

James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.

Throughout his seven decades in Hollywood, Stewart cultivated a versatile career and recognized screen image in such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, Harvey, It's a Wonderful Life, Rear Window, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. He is the most represented leading actor on the AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) and AFI's 10 Top 10 lists. He is also the most represented leading actor on the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time list presented by Entertainment Weekly. As of 2007, ten of his films have been inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Stewart left his mark on a wide range of film genres, including westerns, suspense thrillers, family films, biographies and screwball comedies. He worked for a number of renowned directors later in his career, most notably Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, George Cukor, and Anthony Mann. He won many of the industry's highest honors and earned Lifetime Achievement awards from every major film organization. He died at age 89, leaving behind a legacy of classic performances, and is considered one of the finest actors of the "Golden Age of Hollywood". He was named the third Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.

Early life and career

James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish Presbyterian origin. His Jackson ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations.

His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.

Stewart attended Mercersburg Academy prep school, graduating in 1928. He was active in a variety of activities. He played on the football and track teams, was art editor of the KARUX yearbook, and a member of the choir club, glee club, and John Marshall Literary Society. During his first summer break, Stewart returned to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to work as a brick loader for a local construction company and on highway and road construction jobs where he painted lines on the roads. Over the following two summers, he took a job as an assistant with a professional magician. He also made his first appearance on the stage at Mercersburg, as Buquet in the play The Wolves.

A shy child, Stewart spent much of his after-school time in the basement working on model airplanes, mechanical drawing and chemistry—all with a dream of going into aviation. But he abandoned visions of being a pilot when his father insisted that instead of the United States Naval Academy he attend Princeton University.

Stewart enrolled at Princeton in 1928 as a member of the class of 1932. He excelled at studying architecture, so impressing his professors with his thesis on an airport design that he was awarded a scholarship for graduate studies; He was a member of the Princeton Charter Club as well as a head cheerleader. In his spare time, he enjoyed going to the movies at the time when 'talkies' were just displacing silent films.

His acting and accordion talents at Princeton led him to be invited to the University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company in West Falmouth, a town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The company had been organized in 1928 and would run until 1932, with Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, and Charles Leatherbee as directors. Stewart performed in bit parts in the Players' productions in Cape Cod during the summer of 1932, after he graduated. The troupe had previously included Henry Fonda, who married Margaret Sullavan on Christmas Day 1931, while the University Players were in Baltimore, Maryland, for an 18-week winter season. Sullavan, who had rejoined the University Players in Baltimore in November 1931 at the close of the post-Broadway tour of A Modern Virgin, left the Players for good at the end of The Trial of Mary Dugan in Baltimore in March 1932. By the time Stewart joined the University Players on Cape Cod after his graduation from Princeton in 1932, Fonda and Sullavan's brief marriage had ended. Stewart and Fonda became great friends over the summer of 1932 when they shared an apartment with Joshua Logan and Myron McCormick. When Stewart came to New York at the end of the summer stock season, which had included the Broadway try-out of Goodbye Again, he shared an apartment with Fonda, who had by then finalized his divorce from Sullavan. Along with fellow University Players Alfred Dalrymple and Myron McCormick, Stewart debuted on Broadway as a chauffeur in the comedy Goodbye Again, in which he had two lines. The New Yorker noted, "Mr. James Stewart's chauffeur... comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause."

The play was a moderate success, but times were hard. Many Broadway theaters had been converted to movie houses and the Depression was reaching bottom. "From 1932 through 1934," Stewart later recalled, "I'd only worked three months. Every play I got into folded." By 1934, he had gotten more substantial stage roles, including the modest hit Page Miss Glory and his first dramatic stage role in Sidney Howard's Yellow Jack, which convinced him to continue his acting career. However, Stewart and Fonda, still roommates, were both struggling.

In the fall of 1934, Fonda's success in The Farmer Takes a Wife took him to Hollywood. Finally, Stewart attracted the interest of MGM scout Bill Grady who saw Stewart on the opening night of Divided by Three, a glittering première with many luminaries in attendance, including Irving Berlin and Moss Hart and Fonda, who had returned to New York for the show. With Fonda's encouragement, Stewart agreed to take a screen test, after which he signed a contract with MGM in April 1935, as a contract player for up to seven years at $350 a week.

Upon Stewart's arrival by train in Los Angeles, Fonda greeted him at the station and took him to Fonda's studio-supplied lodging, next door to Greta Garbo. Stewart's first job at the studio was as a participant in screen tests with newly arrived starlets. At first, he had trouble being cast in Hollywood films owing to his gangling looks and shy, humble screen presence. His first film was the poorly received Spencer Tracy vehicle The Murder Man (1935), but Rose Marie (1936), an adaptation of a popular operetta, was more successful. After mixed success in films, he received his first substantial part in 1936's After the Thin Man.

On the romantic front, he found himself dating newly divorced Ginger Rogers, whom he had revered while a student at Princeton only a few years earlier. The romance soon cooled, however, and by chance Stewart encountered Margaret Sullavan again. Stewart found his footing in Hollywood thanks largely to Sullavan, who campaigned for Stewart to be her leading man in the 1936 romantic comedy Next Time We Love. She rehearsed extensively with him, having a noticeable effect on his confidence. She encouraged Stewart to feel comfortable with his unique mannerisms and boyish charm and use them naturally as his own style. In the meantime, roommate Fonda continued to arrange parties with starlets, who found Stewart different from the other young actors and irresistible in his own way. Stewart was enjoying Hollywood life and had no regrets about giving up the stage, as he worked six days a week in the MGM factory. In 1936, he acquired big-time agent Leland Hayward, who would eventually marry Sullavan. Hayward started to chart Stewart's career, deciding the best path for him was through loan-outs to other studios.

Pre-war success

and James Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).]] In 1938, Stewart had a brief, tumultuous, and well-publicized romance with Hollywood queen Norma Shearer, whose husband, Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, had died two years earlier. Stewart began a successful partnership with director Frank Capra in 1938, when he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures to star in You Can't Take It With You. Frank Capra had been impressed by Stewart's minor role in Navy Blue and Gold (1937). The director had recently completed several popular movies, including It Happened One Night (1934), and was looking for the right actor to suit his needs—which other recent actors in his films such as Clark Gable, Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper did not quite fit. Not only was Stewart just what he was looking for, but Capra also found Stewart understood that prototype intuitively and required very little directing. Later Capra commented, "I think he's probably the best actor who's ever hit the screen."

The heart-warming Depression-era film (You Can't Take It With You), starring Capra's "favorite actress", comedienne Jean Arthur, won the 1938 Best Picture Academy Award. The following year saw Stewart work with Capra and Arthur again in the political comedy-drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Stewart replaced intended star Gary Cooper in the film, playing an idealist thrown into the political arena. Upon its October 1939 release, the film garnered critical praise and became a box-office success. Stewart was nominated for the first of five Academy Awards for Best Actor. Even after this great success, Stewart's parents were still trying to talk him into leaving Hollywood and its sinful ways and to return to his home town to lead a decent life. Instead, he took a secret trip to Europe to take a break and returned home in 1939 just as Germany invaded Poland. Made for Each Other (1939) had Stewart sharing the screen with irrepressible Carole Lombard in a melodrama that garnered good reviews for both stars, but did less well with the public. Newsweek wrote that they were "perfectly cast in the leading roles." Between movies, Stewart began a radio career and became a distinctive voice on the "Lux Radio Theater", "The Screen Guild Theater" and other shows. So well-known had his slow drawl become that comedians started to impersonate him, a form of flattery which continued for most of his life.

(1940)]] In 1940, Stewart and Margaret Sullavan reunited for two films. The first, the Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy, The Shop Around the Corner, starred Stewart and Sullavan as co-workers unknowingly involved in a pen-pal romance who cannot stand each other in real life (this was later remade into the musical, In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, and later as the romantic comedy You've Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). It was Stewart's fifth film of the year and that rare film shot in sequence; it was completed in only 27 days. The Mortal Storm, directed by Frank Borzage, was one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films to be produced in Hollywood and featured the pair as friends and then lovers caught in turmoil upon Hitler's rise to power.

Stewart also starred with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in George Cukor's classic The Philadelphia Story (1940). His performance as an intrusive, fast-talking reporter earned him his only Academy Award in a competitive category (Best Actor, 1941), and he beat out his good friend Henry Fonda (The Grapes of Wrath). Stewart thought his performance "entertaining and slick and smooth" but lacking the "guts" of "Mr. Smith." Stewart gave the Oscar statuette to his father, who displayed it for many years in a case inside the front door of his hardware store, alongside other family awards and military medals.

During the months before he began military service, Stewart appeared in a series of screwball comedies with varying levels of success. He followed the mediocre No Time for Comedy (1940) and Come Live with Me (1941) with the Judy Garland musical Ziegfeld Girl and the George Marshall romantic comedy Pot o' Gold. Stewart was drafted in late 1940, a situation that coincided with the lapse in his MGM contract, marking a turning point in Stewart's career, with 28 movies to his credit at that point.

Military service

The Stewart family had deep military roots as both grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, and his father had served during both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Since Stewart considered his father to be the biggest influence on his life, it was not surprising that when another war eventually came, he too was eager to serve. Although members of his family had previously been in the infantry, Stewart chose to become a military flyer.

An early interest in flying led Stewart to gain his Private Pilot certificate in 1935 and Commercial Pilot certificate in 1938. He often flew cross-country to visit his parents in Pennsylvania, navigating by the railroad tracks.

Considered a highly proficient pilot, he even entered a cross-country race as a co-pilot in 1939. Along with musician/composer Hoagy Carmichael, Stewart saw the need for trained war pilots and joined with other Hollywood celebrities to invest in Thunderbird Field, a pilot-training school built and operated by Southwest Airways in Glendale, Arizona. This airfield became part of the United States Army Air Forces training establishment and trained more than 10,000 pilots during WWII, and is now the home of Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Later in 1940, Stewart was drafted into the United States Army but was rejected for failing to meet height and weight requirements for new recruits—Stewart was five pounds (2.3 kg) under the standard. To get up to 148 pounds he sought out the help Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's muscle man and trainer Don Loomis, who was noted for his ability to add or subtract pounds in his studio gymnasium. Stewart subsequently attempted to enlist in the Army Air Corps, but still came in under the weight requirement, although he persuaded the AAC enlistment officer to run new tests, this time passing the weigh-in, with the result that Stewart enlisted in the Army in March 1941. He became the first major American movie star to wear a military uniform in World War II.

Stewart enlisted as a private

Public appearances by Stewart were limited engagements scheduled by the Army Air Forces. "Stewart appeared several times on network radio with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he performed with Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Huston and Lionel Barrymore in an all-network radio program called We Hold These Truths, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights." In early 1942, Stewart was asked to appear in a propaganda film to help recruit the anticipated 100,000 airmen the USAAF would need to win the war. The USAAC's First Motion Picture Unit shot scenes of Lieutenant Stewart in his pilot's flight suit and recorded his voice for narration. The short film, Winning Your Wings, appeared nationwide beginning in late May and was very successful, resulting in 150,000 new recruits.

Stewart was concerned that his expertise and celebrity status would relegate him to instructor duties "behind the lines." His fears were confirmed when he was stationed for six months at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to train bombardiers. He was transferred to Hobbs AAF to become an instructor pilot for the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress, where he trained B-17 pilots for nine months at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho. Stewart appealed to his commander, a pre-war aviator, who understood the situation and reassigned him to a unit going overseas.

with palm by Lt. Gen. Henri Valin, Chief of Staff of the French Air Force, for his role in the liberation of France. USAF photo.]] In August 1943, Stewart was finally assigned to the 445th Bombardment Group at Sioux City AAB, Iowa, first as operations officer of the 703rd Bombardment Squadron and then as its commander, at the rank of captain. In December, the 445th Bombardment Group flew its B-24 Liberator bombers to RAF Tibenham, Norfolk, England and immediately began combat operations. While flying missions over Germany, Stewart was promoted to major. In March 1944, he was transferred as group operations officer to the 453rd Bombardment Group, a new B-24 unit that had been experiencing difficulties. As a means to inspire his new group, Stewart flew as command pilot in the lead B-24 on numerous missions deep into Nazi-occupied Europe. These missions went uncounted at Stewart's orders. His "official" total is listed as 20 and is limited to those with the 445th. In 1944, he twice received the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions in combat and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He also received the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. In July 1944, after flying 20 combat missions, Stewart was made Chief of Staff of the 2nd Combat Bombardment Wing of the Eighth Air Force, and though he was no longer required or expected to fly missions, he continued to do so. Before the war ended, he was promoted to colonel, one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years.

Stewart continued to play a role in the United States Air Force Reserve after the war, achieving the rank of Brigadier General on July 23, 1959. Stewart did not often talk of his wartime service, perhaps due to his desire to be seen as a regular soldier doing his duty instead of as a celebrity. He did appear on the TV series The World At War to discuss the October 14, 1943, bombing mission to Schweinfurt, which was the center of the German ball-bearing industry. This mission is known in USAF history as Black Thursday due to the high casualties it sustained; 60 aircraft were lost out of 291 B-17s dispatched unescorted to Schweinfurt. The available escort aircraft lacked the range to accompany them. Upon his request, he was identified only as "James Stewart, Squadron Commander" in the documentary.

After the war, Stewart served as Air Force Reserve commander of Dobbins Air Reserve Base in the early 1950s. In 1966, Brigadier General James Stewart flew as a non-duty observer in a B-52 on a bombing mission during the Vietnam War. At the time of his B-52 flight, he refused the release of any publicity regarding his participation, as he did not want it treated as a stunt, but as part of his job as an officer in the Air Force Reserve. After 27 years of service, Stewart retired from the Air Force on May 31, 1968. After his retirement, he was promoted to Major General by President Ronald Reagan.

Post-war success

, 1953.]] After the war, Stewart took time off to reassess his career, and he spent much time with his friend Fonda. He was an early investor in Southwest Airways, founded by Leland Hayward, and considered going into the aviation industry if his re-started film career did not prosper. Upon Stewart's return to Hollywood in fall 1945, he decided not to renew his MGM contract. He signed with an MCA talent agency. His former agent Leland Hayward got out of the talent business in 1944 after selling his A-list of stars, including Stewart, to MCA. The move made Stewart one of the first independently contracted actors, and gave him more freedom to choose roles. Stewart was able to work without limits on director and studio availability for the remainder of his career.

For his first film in five years, Stewart appeared in his third and final Frank Capra production, It's a Wonderful Life. Capra paid RKO for the rights to the story and formed his own production company, Liberty Films. The female lead went to Donna Reed, after Capra's perennial first choice, Jean Arthur, was unavailable, and after turn-downs from Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Dvorak and Martha Scott. Stewart appeared as George Bailey, an upstanding small-town man who becomes increasingly frustrated by his ordinary existence and financial troubles. Driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, he is led to reassess his life by Clarence Odbody AS2, an "angel, second class", played by Henry Travers.

After viewing It's a Wonderful Life, President Harry S Truman concluded, "If Bess and I had a son we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart." However, in the decades since the film's release, it grew to define Stewart's film persona and is widely considered as a sentimental Christmas film classic and, according to the American Film Institute, one of the best movies ever made.

In the aftermath of the film, Capra's production company went into bankruptcy, while Stewart started to have doubts about his ability to act after his military hiatus. His father kept insisting he come home and marry a local girl. Meanwhile in Hollywood, his generation of actors were fading and a new wave of actors would soon remake the town, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean.

(1950)]] After a poorly received Magic Town (1947) and the completion of Rope (1948) and Call Northside 777 (1948), Stewart had two flops On Our Merry Way (1948) and You Gotta Stay Happy (1949). In the documentary film James Stewart: A Wonderful Life (1987), hosted by Johnny Carson, Stewart said that he went back to Westerns in 1950 in part because a string of films that were flops.

Stewart decided to return to the stage for the Mary Chase-penned comedy, Harvey, which had opened to nearly universal praise in November 1944. Elwood P. Dowd, the protagonist and Stewart's character, is a wealthy eccentric living with his sister and his niece, and whose best friend is an invisible rabbit as large as a man. Dowd's eccentricity, especially the friendship with the rabbit, is ruining the niece's hopes of finding a husband. While trying to have Dowd committed to a sanatorium, his sister is committed herself while the play follows Dowd on an ordinary day in his not-so-ordinary life. Stewart took over the role from Frank Fay and gained an increased Broadway following in the unconventional play. Stewart received his fourth Best Actor nomination for his performance in the film.

After Harvey, the comedic adventure film Malaya (1949) with Spencer Tracy and the conventional but highly successful biographical film The Stratton Story in 1949, Stewart's first pairing with "on-screen wife" June Allyson, his career took another turn. During the 1950s, he expanded into the western and suspense genres, thanks largely to collaborations with directors Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock.

Other notable performances by Stewart during this time include the critically acclaimed 1950 Delmer Daves western Broken Arrow, which featured Stewart as an ex-soldier and Indian agent making peace with the Apache; a troubled clown in the 1952 Best Picture The Greatest Show on Earth; and Stewart's role as Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's 1957 film The Spirit of St. Louis. He also starred in the western radio show The Six Shooter for its one-season run from 1953-1954. During this time Stewart wore the same cowboy hat and rode the same horse, named "Pie", in most of his Westerns.

Collaborations with Hitchcock and Mann

(1950)]] James Stewart's collaborations with director Anthony Mann increased Stewart's popularity and sent his career into the realm of the western. Stewart's first appearance in a film directed by Mann came with the 1950 western, Winchester '73. In choosing Mann (after first choice Fritz Lang declined), Stewart cemented a powerful partnership. The film, which became a massive box office hit upon its release, set the pattern for their future collaborations. In it, Stewart is a tough, revengeful sharpshooter, the winner of a prized rifle which is stolen and then passes through many hands, until the showdown between Stewart and his brother (Stephen McNally).

Stewart and Mann also collaborated on other films outside the western genre. 1953's The Glenn Miller Story was critically acclaimed, garnering Stewart a BAFTA Award nomination, and (together with The Spirit of St. Louis) cemented the popularity of Stewart's portrayals of 'American heroes'. Thunder Bay, released the same year, transplanted the plot arc of their western collaborations to a more contemporary setting, with Stewart as a Louisiana oil driller facing corruption. Strategic Air Command, released in 1955, allowed Stewart to use his experiences in the United States Air Force on film.

(1948)]] Stewart's starring role in Winchester '73 was also a turning point in Hollywood. Universal Studios, who wanted Stewart to appear in both that film and Harvey, balked at his $200,000 asking price. Stewart's agent, Lew Wasserman, brokered an alternate deal, in which Stewart would appear in both films for no pay, in exchange for a percentage of the profits and cast and director approval.

This wasn't the first such deal at Universal; Abbott and Costello also had a profit participation contract, but they were no longer top-flight moneymakers by 1950. Stewart ended up earning about $600,000 for Winchester '73 alone.

The second collaboration to define Stewart's career in the 1950s was with acclaimed mystery and suspense director Alfred Hitchcock. Like Mann, Hitchcock uncovered new depths to Stewart's acting, showing a protagonist confronting his fears and his repressed desires. Stewart's first movie with Hitchcock was the technologically innovative 1948 film Rope, shot in long "real time" takes.

The two collaborated for the second of four times on the 1954 hit Rear Window, one of Hitchcock's masterpieces. Stewart portrays photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, loosely based on Life photographer Robert Capa, who projects his fantasies and fears onto the people he observes out his apartment window while on hiatus due to a broken leg. Jeffries gets into more than he can handle, however, when he believes he has witnessed a salesman (Raymond Burr) commit a murder, and when his glamorous girlfriend (Grace Kelly), at first disdainful of his voyeurism and skeptical about any crime, eventually is drawn in and tries to help solve the mystery. Limited by his wheelchair, Stewart is masterfully led by Hitchcock to react to what his character sees with mostly facial responses. It was a landmark year for Stewart, becoming the highest grossing actor of 1954 and the most popular Hollywood star in the world, displacing John Wayne.

(1958)]] After starring in Hitchcock's remake of the director's earlier production, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with co-star Doris Day, Stewart starred in what many consider Hitchcock's most personal film, Vertigo (1958). The movie starred Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he is shadowing. Scottie's obsession inevitably leads to the destruction of everything he once had and believed in. Though the film is widely considered a classic today, Vertigo met with negative reviews and poor box office receipts upon its release, and marked the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. Stewart was also disappointed. The director blamed the film's failure on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences, and cast Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest (1959), a role Stewart had very much wanted (Grant was actually four years older than Stewart). Today, Vertigo is ranked second only to Citizen Kane in the 2002 Sight & Sound critics poll for the greatest films ever made.

Career in the 1960s and 1970s

In 1960, James Stewart was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and received his fifth and final Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, for his role in the 1959 Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder. The early courtroom drama starred Stewart as Paul Biegler, the lawyer of a hot-tempered soldier (played by Ben Gazzara) who claims temporary insanity after murdering a tavern owner who raped his wife. The film featured a career-making performance by George C. Scott as the prosecutor. The film was sexually frank for its time (some thought it sordid), and its provocative promotional campaign helped gain it box office success, though Ben-Hur outgrossed all movies by a huge margin and swept the Academy Awards that year. Stewart's nomination was one of seven for the film (Charlton Heston was the winner), and saw his transition into the final decades of his career.

On January 1, 1960 Stewart received the devastating news that Margaret Sullavan had committed suicide, most likely over despondency from her loss of hearing and its effect on her stage career. As a friend, mentor, and focus of his early romantic urges, she had a unique influence on Stewart's life.

(1962)]] In the early 1960s Stewart took leading roles in three John Ford films, his first work with the acclaimed director. The first, Two Rode Together, paired him with Richard Widmark in a Western with thematic echoes of Ford's The Searchers. The next, 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (with John Wayne), is a classic "psychological" western, with Stewart featured as an Eastern attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (played by Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town. At story's end, Stewart's character—now a rising political figure—faces a difficult ethical choice as he attempts to reconcile his actions with his personal integrity. The film's billing is unusual in that Stewart was given top billing over Wayne in the trailers and on the posters but Wayne had top billing in the film itself, a system later repeated by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men. The film garnered so-so reviews and fared poorly at the box office, but is now considered a late Ford classic.

How the West Was Won (which Ford co-directed, though without directing Stewart's scenes) and Cheyenne Autumn were western epics released in 1962 and 1964 respectively. While the Cinerama production How the West Was Won went on to win three Oscars and reaped massive box office figures, Cheyenne Autumn, in which a white-suited Stewart played Wyatt Earp in a long sequence in the middle of the movie, failed domestically and was quickly forgotten. It was Ford's final Western and Stewart's last feature film with Ford.

Having played his last romantic lead in 1958's Bell, Book and Candle, and silver-haired (although not all was his—he wore a partial hairpiece starting with "It's a Wonderful Life" and in every film thereafter), Stewart transitioned into more family-related films in the 1960s when he signed a multi-movie deal with 20th Century Fox. These included the successful Henry Koster outing Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and the less memorable films Take Her, She's Mine (1963) and Dear Brigitte (1965), which featured French model Brigitte Bardot as the object of Stewart's son's mash notes. The Civil War period film Shenandoah (1965) and the western family film The Rare Breed fared better at the box office; the Civil War movie with strong antiwar and humanitarian themes was a smash hit in the South.

As an aviator, Stewart was particularly interested in aviation films and had pushed to appear in several in the 1950s; most notably Strategic Air Command and The Spirit of St. Louis. He continued in this vein in the 1960s, most notably in a role as a hard-bitten pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Subbing for Stewart, famed stunt pilot and air racer Paul Mantz was killed when he crashed the "Tallmantz Phoenix P-1", the specially-made, single-engine movie model, in an abortive "touch-and-go". Stewart also narrated the film X-15 in 1961. In 1964, he and several other military aviators, including Curtis LeMay, Paul Tibbets, and Bruce Sundlun were founding directors of the board of Tibbets' Executive Jet Aviation Corporation.

After a progression of lesser western films in the late '60s and early '70s, James Stewart transitioned from cinema to television. In the 1950s he had made guest appearances on the Jack Benny Program (Benny was his real life neighbor and good friend). Stewart first starred in the NBC comedy The Jimmy Stewart Show, on which he played a college professor. He followed it with the CBS mystery Hawkins, in which he played a small town lawyer investigating his cases. The series garnered Stewart a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic TV Series, but failed to gain a wide audience and was cancelled after one season. (Andy Griffith fared much better later in Matlock, based on a similar formula.) During this time, Stewart periodically appeared on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, sharing poems he had written at different times in his life. His poems were later compiled into a short collection titled Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989).

Stewart returned to films after an absence of five years with a major role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976) where Stewart played a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis. At one point, both Wayne and Stewart were flubbing their lines repeatedly and Stewart turned to director Don Siegel and said, "You'd better get two better actors". Stewart also appeared in supporting roles in Airport '77, the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum and The Magic of Lassie (1978). The latter film received poor reviews and flopped at the box office. Some critics expressed their dismay at seeing the 70-year-old veteran singing as the grandfather. Stewart responded it was the only script he had been offered without any sex, profanity or graphic violence.

Later career and death

Following the failure of The Magic of Lassie, Stewart went into semi-retirement from acting. He donated his papers, films, and other records to Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library in 1983. Stewart had diversified investments including real estate, oil wells, a charter-plane company and membership on major corporate boards. He became a multimillionaire. In the 1980s and 1990s, he did voiceovers for commercials for Campbell's Soups. He made frequent visits to the Reagan White House and traveled on the lecture circuit. The re-release of his Hitchcock films gained Stewart renewed recognition. Rear Window and Vertigo were particularly praised by film critics, which helped bring these films to the attention of younger movie-goers. He was presented an Academy Honorary Award by his friend Cary Grant in 1985, "for his 50 years of memorable performances, for his high ideals both on and off the screen, with respect and affection of his colleagues."

Stewart became a real life "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in 1988, when he made an impassioned plea in Congressional hearings, along with colleagues Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and film director Martin Scorsese, against Ted Turner's decision to 'colorize' classic black and white films, including It's a Wonderful Life. Stewart stated, "the coloring of black-and-white films is wrong. It's morally and artistically wrong and these profiteers should leave our film industry alone".

In 1989, Stewart joined Peter F. Paul in founding the American Spirit Foundation to apply entertainment industry resources to developing innovative approaches to public education and to assist the emerging democracy movements in the former Iron Curtain countries. Paul arranged for Stewart, through the offices of President Boris Yeltsin, to send a special print of It's a Wonderful Life, translated by Lomonosov Moscow State University, to Russia as the first American program ever to be broadcast on Russian television. On January 5, 1992, coinciding with the first day of the existence of the democratic Commonwealth of Independent States and Russia, and the first free Russian Orthodox Christmas Day, Russian TV Channel 2 broadcast It's a Wonderful Life to 200 million Russians who celebrated an American holiday tradition with the American people for the first time in Russian history.

In association with politicians and celebrities such as President Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, California Governor George Deukmejian, Bob Hope and Charlton Heston, Stewart worked from 1987 to 1993 on projects that enhanced the public appreciation and understanding of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In 1991, James Stewart voiced the character of Sheriff Wylie Burp in the movie , which was his last film role.

Shortly before his 80th birthday, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered. "As someone who 'believed in hard work and love of country, love of family and love of community.'"

Stewart died from a blood clot on a lung on July 2, 1997, at his home in Beverly Hills. His death came one day after fellow screen legend and The Big Sleep co-star Robert Mitchum had died. Stewart is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

"America lost a national treasure today," President Bill Clinton said on the day Stewart died. "Jimmy Stewart was a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot."

Joan Crawford, Stewart's co-star in the early period, praised him as an "endearing perfectionist" with "a droll sense of humor and a shy way of watching you to see if you react to that humor." and the two gained a reputation as playboys. Once married, both men's children noted that their favorite activity when not working seemed to be quietly sharing time together while building and painting model airplanes, a hobby they had taken up in New York, years earlier.

After World War II, Stewart settled down, at age 41, marrying former model Gloria Hatrick McLean (1918–1994) on August 9, 1949. As Stewart loved to recount in self-mockery, "I, I, I pitched the big question to her last night and to my surprise she, she, she said yes!".

Stewart adopted her two sons, Michael and Ronald, and with Gloria he had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, on May 7, 1951. The couple remained married until her death from lung cancer on February 16, 1994. Ronald McLean was killed in action on June 8, 1969, at the age of 24, while serving as a Marine Corps Lieutenant in Vietnam. Kelly Stewart is an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis.

, Los Angeles.]] While visiting India in 1959, Stewart reportedly smuggled the remains of a supposed yeti, the so-called Pangboche Hand, by hiding them in his luggage (specifically, in his wife's underwear) when he flew from India to London, as a favor to Tom Slick.

James Stewart was active in philanthropic affairs over the years. His signature charity event, "The Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon Race", held each year since 1982, has raised millions of dollars for the Child and Family Development Center at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. (Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was also the leader of the "Boy Rangers", a fictional organization patterned after cub scouts.) An award for Boy Scouts, "The James M. Stewart Good Citizenship Award" has been presented since May 17, 2003.

One of Stewart's lesser-known talents was his homespun poetry. He once read a poem that he had written about his dog, entitled "Beau," while on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. By the end of this reading, Carson's eyes were welling with tears. This was later parodied on a late 1980s episode of the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live, with Dana Carvey as Stewart reciting the poem on Weekend Update and bringing anchor Dennis Miller to tears.

In addition to poetry, Stewart would talk during Tonight Show appearances about his avid gardening. Stewart purchased the house next door to his own home at 918 North Roxbury Drive, razed the house, and installed his garden in the lot.

Politics

Stewart was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party and actively campaigned for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He was a "hawk" on the Vietnam War. Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck issued a statement calling for support of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968.

One of his best friends was fellow actor Henry Fonda, despite the fact that the two men had very different political ideologies. A political argument in 1947 resulted in a fist fight between them, but the two apparently maintained their friendship by never discussing politics again. There is a brief reference to their political differences in character in their movie The Cheyenne Social Club. In the last years of his life, he donated to the campaign of Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election and to Democratic Florida governor Bob Graham in his successful run for the Senate.

Filmography

From the beginning of James Stewart's career in 1935 through his final theatrical project in 1991, he appeared in 92 films, television programs and shorts. Through the course of this illustrious career, he appeared in many landmark and critically acclaimed films, including such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Rear Window, The Spirit of St. Louis and Vertigo. His roles in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey, and Anatomy of a Murder earned him Academy Award nominations (he won for Philadelphia Story). Stewart's career defied the boundaries of genre and trend, and he made his mark in screwball comedies, suspense thrillers, westerns, biographies and family films.

Broadway stage performances

Carry Nation (October–November 1932)

Goodbye Again (December 1932 – July 1933)

Spring in Autumn (October–November 1933)

All Good Americans (December 1933 – January 1934)

Yellow Jack (May 1934)

Divided By Three (October 1934)

Page Miss Glory (November 1934 – March 1935)

A Journey By Night (April 1935)

Harvey (July–August 1947, July–August 1948, replacing vacationing Frank Fay)

Harvey (revival, February–May 1970)

. It was once stolen but was subsequently replaced.]]

Honors and tributes

James Stewart was presented various kinds of film industry awards, military and civilian medals, honorary degrees, memorials and tributes over the years for his contribution to performing arts, humanitarianism, and military service.

See also

List of film collaborations

References

;Notes ;Citations ;Bibliography

Beaver, Jim. "James Stewart." Films in Review, October 1980.

Brig. Gen. James M. Stewart. "National Museum of the United States Air Force Fact Sheet." National Museum of the United States Air Force''. Retrieved: February 18, 2007.

Coe, Jonathan. James Stewart: Leading Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1994. ISBN 0-7475-1574-3.

Collins, Thomas W. Jr. "Stewart, James." American National Biography Online. "Stewart, James." Retrieved: February 18, 2007.

Cox, Stephen. It's a Wonderful Life: A Memory Book. Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House, 2003. ISBN 1-58182-337-1.

Eliot, Mark. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2006. ISBN 1-4000-5221-1.

The Jimmy Stewart Museum Home Page. The Jimmy Stewart Museum Home Page, Access date: February 18, 2007.

Fonda, Henry as told to Howard Teichmann. Fonda: My Life. New York: A Signet Book, New American Library, 1981. ISBN 0-451-11858-8.

Houghton, Norris. But Not Forgotten: The Adventure of the University Players. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951.

Jackson, Kenneth T., Karen Markoe and Arnie Markoe. The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (5). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-68480-663-0.

Jones, Ken D., Arthur F. McClure and Alfred E. Twomey. The Films of James Stewart. New York: Castle Books, 1970.

McGowan, Helene. James Stewart. London: Bison Group, 1992, ISBN 0-86124-925-9.

Pickard, Roy. Jimmy Stewart: A Life in Film. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-08828-0.

Prendergast, Tom and Sara, eds. "Stewart, James". International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th edition. London: St. James Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55862-450-3.

Prendergast, Tom and Sara, eds. "Stewart, James". St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 5th edition. London: St. James Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55862-529-1.

Robbins, Jhan. Everybody's Man: A Biography of Jimmy Stewart. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985. ISBN 0-399-12973-1.

Smith, Starr. Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot. St. Paul, Minnesota: Zenith Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7603-2199-X.

Thomas, Tony. A Wonderful Life: The Films and Career of James Stewart. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1988. ISBN 0-8065-1081-1.

Wayne, Jane Ellen.The Leading Men of MGM. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-78671-475-1.

Wright, Stuart J. An Emotional Gauntlet: From Life in Peacetime America to the War in European Skies- A History of 453rd Bomb Group Crews. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. ISBN 0-29920-520-7.

External links

Feaster, Felicia. Turner Classic Movies">James Stewart Profile Turner Classic Movies

Kronenberg, Harold. Flying with Jimmy Stewart

New York Times (July 3, 1997)">Obituary:"James Stewart, the Hesitant Hero, Dies at 89". New York Times (July 3, 1997)

CNN, (July 2, 1997)">Obituary:"Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart dead at 89". CNN, (July 2, 1997)

News: Princeton University (1997)">"Princeton to Honor Famed Alumnus Jimmy Stewart '32 With Tribute and Theater Dedication". Princeton University (1997)

Centennial Tribute to James Stewart

The Jimmy Stewart Museum

National Museum of the United States Air Force">Brig. Gen. James M. Stewart. National Museum of the United States Air Force

A Kennedy Center Honors: James Stewart

Jimmy Stewart. Presidential Medal of Freedom

Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. Entertainment Weekly

Interview at the National Film Theatre in 1972. British Film Institute

Mr. Stewart Goes to Vietnam. Article from Vietnam magazine about Stewart's B52 mission in 1966

University of Alabama">Images:Stewart Pictures. Telecommunication & Film Department, University of Alabama

Life Magazine (1945)">Images:"Col. James M. Stewart stands with his father outside of the family's hardware store.". Life Magazine (1945)

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Coordinates	52°52′36″N21°5′43″N
Birthdate	March 22, 1941
Birthplace	New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Professor, Poet, Author, Anthologist
Nationality	American
Notable works	The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning

Billy Collins (born William James Collins March 22, 1941) is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004-2006.

Biography

Early years

Collins was born in New York City to William and Katherine Collins. Katherine Collins was a nurse who stopped working to raise the couple's only child. Mrs. Collins had the ability to recite verses on almost any subject, which she often did, and cultivated in her young son the love of words, both written and spoken. Billy Collins attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and received a B.A. (English) from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963 and received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of California, Riverside. His professors at Riverside included Victorian scholar and poet Robert Peters. In 1975 Collins founded The Mid Atlantic Review with his good friend and co-editor, Michael Shannon.

Career

Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968 and has taught for over thirty years. Additionally, he is a founding Advisory Board member of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. He also has taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York as well as teaching workshops across the U.S. and in Ireland. Collins is a member of the faculty of SUNY Stonybrook Southampton College, where he teaches poetry workshops. Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and held the title until 2003. Collins served as Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 until 2006. Collins has been named Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute in Winter Park, Florida, an affiliate of Rollins College. He is an editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review.

As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins read his poem The Names at a special joint session of the United States Congress on September 6, 2002, held to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks.Watch Collins read the poem here. Though, unlike their British counterparts, U.S. poets laureate are not asked or expected to write occasional poetry, Collins was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem especially for that event. Collins will not read "The Names" in public, nor will he include it in any of his books. As Poet Laureate, Collins instituted the program, Poetry 180 for high schools. Collins chose 180 poems for the program and the accompanying book, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry-- one for each day of the school year. Collins edited a second anthology, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day to refresh the supply of available poems. The program is online, and poems are available there for no charge.

In 1997, Collins recorded The Best Cigarette, a collection of 34 of his poems that would become a bestseller. In 2005, the CD was re-released under a Creative Commons license, allowing free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. He also recorded two of his poems for the audio versions of Garrison Keillor's collection Good Poems (2002). Collins has appeared on Keillor's radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, numerous times, where he gained a portion of his large following. In 2005, Collins recorded "Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space" in New York City. Collins was introduced by his friend, actor Bill Murray.

Billy Collins has been called "The most popular poet in America" by the New York Times. When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House, the advance he received shocked the poetry world — a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry. The deal secured for Collins through his literary agent, Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic, with the editor Daniel Menaker, remained the talk of the poetry world, and indeed the literary world, for quite some time.

Over the years, the U.S. magazine Poetry has awarded Collins several prizes in recognition of poems they publish. During the 1990s, Collins won five such prizes. The magazine also selected him as "Poet of the Year" in 1994. In 2005 Collins was the first annual recipient of its Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 1993, from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Poetry collections

Pokerface (1977)

Video Poems (1980)

; University of Arkansas Press, 2006, ISBN 9781557288233

Questions About Angels (1991)

The Art of Drowning University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, ISBN 9780822955672

Picnic, Lightning (1998)

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000)

; reprint Random House, Inc., 2002, ISBN 9780375755194 ; reprint Random House, Inc., 2007, ISBN 9780375755217

She Was Just Seventeen (2006)

Editor

References

External links

The Library of Congress. Collins Online Resources

Biography

Billy Collins Biography at PoetryFoundation.org

Griffin Poetry Prize biography (2004 judge and award emcee)

Billy Collins biography at poets.org

Audio and video

Audio: Billy Collins reading at the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar

Audio: Billy Collins lecture and reading at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar: "Dear Reader"

11 animated poems read by Billy Collins

Collins at Open-Door Poetry

33 poems read aloud by Billy Collins, no charge (Creative Commons)

Billy Collins reads "My Jacket is Polished Gray" from The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation

Interviews

Littoral, the Journal of the Key West Literary Seminar">"The Pleasures of Disorientation": 2009 Interview on Littoral, the Journal of the Key West Literary Seminar

Q&A; With Billy Collins

Author interview with Collins in Guernica Magazine (Guernicamag.com)

Category:American poets Category:American Poets Laureate Category:Lehman College faculty Category:College of the Holy Cross alumni Category:People from New York City Category:University of California, Riverside alumni Category:Sarah Lawrence College faculty Category:1941 births Category:Living people