David Whyte | |
|---|---|
 Whyte in 2017 | |
| Born | 2 November 1955 Mirfield, Yorkshire |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | Irish, British, American |
| Spouse | Gayle Karen Young |
David Whyte (born 2 November 1955) is an Anglo-Irish poet. [1] [2] [3] He has said that all of his poetry and philosophy are based on "the conversational nature of reality". [4] His book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (1994) topped the best-seller charts in the United States.
Whyte's mother was from Waterford, Ireland, and his father was a Yorkshireman. [5] [6] He attributes his poetic interest to both the songs and the poetry [7] of his mother's Irish heritage and to the landscape of West Yorkshire. He grew up in West Yorkshire and has commented that he had "a Wordsworthian childhood", in the fields and woods and on the moors. [8] [9] Whyte has a degree in marine zoology from Bangor University. [5] [10]
During his twenties, Whyte worked as a naturalist and lived in the Galápagos Islands, where he experienced a near drowning on the southern shore of Hood Island. [9] [11] [12] [13] [14] He led anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon and the Himalayas. [15]
Revelation must be
terrible with no time left
to say goodbye.
Imagine that moment
staring at the still waters
with only the brief tremor
of your body to say
you are leaving everything
and everyone you know behind.
Whyte moved to the United States in 1981 and began a career as a poet and speaker in 1986. [17] From 1987, he began taking his poetry and philosophy to larger audiences, including consulting and lecturing on organisational leadership models in the US and UK exploring the role of creativity in business. [13] [17] [18] [19] He has worked with companies such as Boeing, AT&T, NASA, Toyota, The Royal Air Force and the Arthur Andersen accountancy group. [20] [21]
Work and vocation, and "Conversational Leadership" are the subjects of several of Whyte's prose books, including Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as Pilgrimage of Identity, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship [9] and The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of The Soul in Corporate America, which topped the business best seller lists, selling 155,000 copies. [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]
Whyte has written ten volumes of poetry and four books of prose. [25] Pilgrim is based on the human need to travel, "From here to there". [26] The House of Belonging looks at the same human need for home. [27] He describes his collection Everything Is Waiting For You (2003) as arising from the grief at the loss of his mother. [28] Pilgrim was published in May 2012. [5] His latest book is Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, [29] an attempt to "rehabilitate" many everyday words we often use only in pejorative or unimaginative ways. [30] He has also written for newspapers, including The Huffington Post [31] [32] and The Observer. [33] He leads group poetry and walking journeys regularly in Ireland, England and Italy. [9]
Whyte has an honorary degree from Neumann College, Pennsylvania, and from Royal Roads University, British Columbia, and is Associate Fellow of both Templeton College, Oxford, and Saïd Business School, Oxford. [5] [10]
Whyte has spent a portion of every year for the last twenty-five years in County Clare, Ireland. Over the years and over a number of volumes of poetry he has built a cycle of poems that evoke many of the ancient pilgrimage sites of The Burren mountains of North Clare and of Connemara. [34] [35]
Whyte runs the "Many Rivers" organisation and "Invitas: The Institute for Conversational Leadership", which he founded in 2014. [15] [36] [37] He has lived in Seattle and on Whidbey Island and currently lives in the US Pacific North West; he holds US, British and Irish citizenship. [38] [6] [23] He is married to Gayle Karen Young, former Chief Talent and Culture Officer [39] of the Wikimedia Foundation. He has a son, Brendan, from his first marriage to Autumn Preble and a daughter, Charlotte, from his second marriage to Leslie Cotter. [40] Whyte has practised Zen and was a regular rock climber. [9] He was a close friend of the Irish poet John O'Donohue. [41]
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse, and he is considered one of the great poets in the English language.
John Dowland was an English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep", "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe", "Now o now I needs must part", and "In darkness let me dwell". His instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and with the 20th century's early music revival, has been a continuing source of repertoire for lutenists and classical guitarists.
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is some of the most well-known in twentieth-century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Moscow famine.
Prose is language that follows the natural flow or rhythm of speech, ordinary grammatical structures, or, in writing, typical conventions and formatting. Thus, prose ranges from informal speaking to formal academic writing. Prose differs most notably from poetry, which follows an intentionally artistic structure. Poetic structures vary dramatically by language; in English poetry, language is often organized by a rhythmic metre and a rhyme scheme; written poetry is often formatted in verse.
Brigid or Brigit, also Bríd, is a goddess of pre-Christian Ireland. She appears in Irish mythology as a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the daughter of the Dagda and wife of Bres, with whom she had a son named Ruadán. Her sacred tree appears to have been the birch, given some older Imbolc-related traditions.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote sonnets on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
William Edgar Stafford was an American poet and pacifist. He was the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.
James Harrison was an American poet, novelist, and essayist. He was a prolific and versatile writer publishing over three dozen books in several genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, and memoir. He wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism, and published essays on food, travel, and sport. Harrison indicated that, of all his writing, his poetry meant the most to him.
Thomas Kinsella was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s and, around the same time, translated early Irish poetry into English. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States to teach English at universities including Temple University. Kinsella continued to publish steadily until the 2010s.
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
Thomas Parnell was an Anglo-Irish poet and clergyman who was a friend of both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
David John Murray Wright was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska. Published in 2024, the book May the Owl Call Again, A Return to Poet John Meade Haines, 1924-2011 focuses on the last 2 years of the poet’s life. With 32 poems, 5 essays, and 2 Letters to the Editor, it is an intimate correspondence of words, writings, and letters with reflections on life, death, and friendship.
Greg Delanty is an Irish poet. An issue of the British magazine, Agenda, was dedicated to him.
Roger Francis Langley was an English poet and diarist. During his life, he was loosely affiliated with the Cambridge poetry scene.
Dennis O'Driscoll was an Irish poet, essayist, critic and editor. Regarded as one of the best European poets of his time, Eileen Battersby considered him "the lyric equivalent of William Trevor" and a better poet "by far" than Raymond Carver. Gerard Smyth regarded him as "one of poetry's true champions and certainly its most prodigious archivist. His book on Seamus Heaney is regarded as the definitive biography of the Nobel laureate.
James Harpur is a British-born Irish poet who has published eight books of poetry. He has won a number of awards, including the Michael Hartnett Award and the UK National Poetry Competition. He has also published books of non-fiction and a novel, The Pathless Country. He lives in West Cork and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
