This exhibit explores the poets who have been both shaped by Ann Arbor’s literary culture and active in shaping that culture, beginning with Robert Frost and ending with poets who still walk and write among us.

Though most people associate him with New England, Robert Frost spent several years in Ann Arbor in the 1920s, serving as the University of Michigan’s poet in residence. In the decades that followed, U-M offered teaching positions to scores of remarkable poets, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Award, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. A partial roll call would include such names as W. H. Auden, Robert Hayden, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Alice Fulton, and Anne Carson. A number of other major poets—Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, X. J. Kennedy, Jane Kenyon—studied at the university. And in 1978, Donald Hall founded the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series—the most notable series of its kind in the country, and now boasting 115 titles (https://www.press.umich.edu/browse/series/UM31).

Exhibit curated by Sigrid Anderson Cordell, U-M Library, and Cody Walker, U-M Department of English.