Etheridge Knight, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetEtheridge Knight
African-American poet
Date of Birth: 19-Apr-1931
Place of Birth: Corinth, Mississippi, United States
Date of Death: 10-Mar-1991
Profession: poet
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Aries 
About Etheridge Knight
- Etheridge Knight (April 19, 1931 – March 10, 1991) was an African-American poet who made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison.
- The book recalls in verse his eight-year-long sentence after his arrest for robbery in 1960.
- By the time he left prison, Knight had prepared a second volume featuring his own writings and works of his fellow inmates.
- This second book, first published in Italy under the title Voce negre dal carcere, appeared in English in 1970 as Black Voices from Prison.
- These works established Knight as one of the major poets of the Black Arts Movement, which flourished from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s.
- With roots in the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement, Etheridge Knight and other American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African-American cultural and historical experience.Knight is also considered an important poet in the mainstream American tradition.
- 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 and feeling....'"
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