Knight, Etheridge, 1931-1991

Etheridge Knight (April 19, 1931 – March 10, 1991) was an African-American poet. Considered one of the most important poets of the American literary tradition, he was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the American Book Award for Poetry. Born in Corinth, Mississippi, he was incarcerated in Indianapolis in 1960, where he discovered poetry. Knight first made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison, which recalls in verse his eight-year-long sentence. Poems established Knight as one of the major poets of the Black Arts Movement, which flourished from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. In addition to his other accolades, Knight was nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In his 2012 book Understanding Etheridge Knight, Michael S. Collins calls Knight "a mighty American poet....He and Wallace Stevens stand as 'two poles of American poetry,' according to his better-known fellow writer Robert Bly. Or, rather, Knight was, as he often said, a poet of the belly: a poet of the earth and of the body, a poet of the feelings from which cries and blood oaths and arias come, while Stevens was a poet, arguably, of the ache left in the intellect after it tears itself from God. 'Ideas are not the source of poetry,' Knight told one interviewer. 'For me it's passion, heart and soul....'"