The speaker of a poem by this author requests “Jesus Saviour Pilot Me / Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this first African American to be US Poet Laureate. He wrote the poems “Those Winter Sundays” and “Middle Passage.”
ANSWER: Robert Hayden
[10e] Hayden wrote a poem framed as “A Letter from [this author],” who is considered the first African American to publish a poetry book. This author claimed “‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land” in “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”
ANSWER: Phyllis Wheatley [or Phillis Wheatly Peters]
[10m] A Hayden poem in this genre, typically written in AABA or ABAB quatrains and set to music, is addressed to Nat Turner. Another poem in this form proclaims “each man kills the thing he loves.”
ANSWER: ballads [accept “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”; or “The Ballad of Nat Turner”]
<Ganon Evans, Literature - American - Poetry> ~21077~ <Editor: Chandler West>