Celebrate poets born in January!

January birthday poets include Scots bard Robert Burns, Kahlil Gibran whose philosophical poetry epic, "The Prophet," swept the United States in the late 1960s, Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe. Here are a few of our January birthday poets, including some contemporaries whose names are set in bold type.

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here:
My heart’s in the Highlands a chasing the deer;
A chasing the wild deer, and following the roe.
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the north.
The birth place of Valour, the country of Worth.
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
- Scots poet Robert Burns (image at left) was born January 25 in 1759 and was honored last year on his 250th birthday. The excerpt above is from “Farewell to the Highlands”

2 Robert Nathan 1894-1985 (New York)
2 Ai 1947- (Texas/Arizona)
6 Kahlil Gibran 1883-1931 (born Lebanon, lived New York)
6 Carl Sandburg 1878-1967 (Illinois born of Swedish immigrants)
7 Faiz Ahmed Faiz 1910/11-1984 (Pakistani Urdu poet) (photo below right)
9 Hayyim Nahman Bialik1873-1934 (Jewish-Russian poet who wrote in Hebrew)
9 William Johnson Cory 1823-1892 (English)
9 Lizette Woodworth Reese 1856-1936 (Maryland)
9 William Meredith 1919-2007 (born New York)
10 Robinson Jeffers 1887-1962 (Pennsylvania and Northern California)
14 Christian Friedrich Henrici, known as Picander, 1700-1764 (Germany, a poet who collaborated with J. S. Bach)
15 Osip Mandelstam 1891-1938 (born in Warsaw, Russian-Jew)
15 Ivor Cutler 1923-2006 (Scottish-Jewish)
16 Robert Service 1874-1958 (born to a Scottish family in England, emigrated to Canada)
16 Jules Supervielle 1884-1960 (French, born in Montevideo, Uruguay)
18 A.A. Milne 1882-1956 (English)
19 Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 (born Boston, lived in Virginia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania)
19 Pat Mora 1942- (Mexican-American born El Paso, Texas) (photo below left)

20 Huddie Ledbetter better known as Leadbelly 1889-1949 (African-American blues poet/songwriter)21 Richard P. Blackmur 1904-1965 (Massachusetts)
21 Thomas Merton 1915-1968 (born in France, an American Trappist monk who lived in Kentucky)
21 Ian McMillan 1956- (English Yorkshire poet)
22 George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1788-1824 (English)
22 Howard Moss 1922-1987 (Jewish-American poet born in New York; won Pulitzer Prize in 1971)
25 Robert Burns 1759-1796 (Scottish)
27 Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 (English)
29 Halfdan Rasmussen 1915-2002 (Danish)
30 Sterling Plumpp 1940- (African-American poet born in Clinton, Mississippi)

With a vague soughing of leaves
A black wind rustles by
And a flickering swallow draws
A circle against the dark sky.

In my gently dying heart
There is quiet contending
Between twilight drawing on
And daylight ending.

A copper moon stood above
Woods that night filled with darkness.
Why ius there so little music
And why such stillness?
- Osip Mandelstam, from Stones, translated by Robert Tracy