Does anyone know of any good American poets? Particularly Christian poets? (If any of you are published poets, this counts too).

For English, I have to make a poetry anthology with ten pages of poetry - unfortunately, since I'm a junior, many of my favorite poets were squashed because since we are doing American literature, we need American poets and they were not American. Was totally going to put the Psalms in there...

These are the only Poets I'm sure were Christian.
Louisa May Alcott, Wendell Berry and Jane Kenyon.

Also there is T. S. Eliot who was saved midway through his career.

And these are some of the great American poets. (At least my greats.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain.

I have one rather unusual poem that was published, and I reprinted it on my blog: http://jonathangarner.blogspot.com/2011 ... rical.html

Robert Frost, as mentioned. He's my favorite poet.

Wasn't he British, though?

I'm fairly sure that Jonathan Edwards wrote at least some poetry. And there's always Anne Bradstreet. And any number of hymn writers of the past three hundred years and more.


Define "published". By American copyright law, I can't sell "first serial rights" to the poems I've posted on my blog (or publicly on Facebook) because I've "published" them there; on the other hand, by a more usual understanding of the term, a few of my poems were printed in my college's literary magazine.

He was born and lived in America till age 25. Then he moved to England.

I would assume that it would have to be at least in a magazine or some sort of book. It just being on the internet probably would not count; I will have to ask him though.

Yeah, that's what I would expect. But, on the other hand, while I've had a handful of pieces in Dialogue (my college's literary magazine), that doesn't have very wide distribution---it only makes it off campus if someone takes a copy off ---and it might not pass the threshold the American copyright law sets for what's been "published" and so used up its "first serial rights.". So some of the poems I've "published" (as far as copyright law is concerned) on my blog may well have had wider distribution than those printed in the Dialogue.

Oh, and in high school I entered a poem (which, by lack of competition, was our class poem) in a contest that (it turned out) was apparently designed to sell books of "the contest winners", and had it accepted as an "honorable mention"---but I don't remember whether I sent in the release form to let them use it or not.

I know a great American Poet: Ophelia MirZA Shaye. But if you want published, sorry. I have no idea.