20th-century American poets

James Erwin Schevill (June 10, 1920 – January 30, 2009) was an American poet, critic, playwright and professor at San Francisco State University and Brown University, and the recipient of Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships.

Ann Stanford (November 25, 1916 – July 12, 1987) was an American poet.

Frederic Prokosch (May 17, 1906 – June 2, 1989) was an American writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator.

Thomas F. Parkinson (1920–1992) Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, was a poet in his own right; an expert on the poetry of W. B. Yeats; and one of the first academic authorities to write about the Beat poets and novelists of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. A deeply thoughtful man of great integrity, he was a quiet political activist for much of his life, and survived a murder attempt in 1961 by a deranged former student who sought to "get someone who was associated with Communism." Though Parkinson survived being shot in the face (and bore the scars of the assault for the rest of his life), the teaching assistant who was with him at the time was killed. Thomas Parkinson died of an apparent heart attack in 1992, at age 72, after a long illness.

Leonard E. Nathan, (November 8 1924 – June 3, 2007) was an American poet, critic, and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley where he retired in 1991.
Born in El Monte, California, Nathan earned a bachelor's degree in English at UC Berkeley in 1950, a master's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961. He was then hired as a lecturer in UC Berkeley's Department of Speech, and was promoted to associate professor in 1965 and to professor in 1968.
Among other honors, he received the National Institute of Arts and Letters prize for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Phelan Award for Narrative Poetry, and three silver medals from the Commonwealth Club of California, including one for The Potato Eaters. His poems were also published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New England Review and The Georgia Review, among other publications.

William Procter Matthews III (November 11, 1942 – November 12, 1997) was an American poet and essayist.

Joseph Langland (February 16, 1917 – April 9, 2007) was an American poet.

Ronald Johnson (November 25, 1935 – March 4, 1998) was a poet from Ashland, Kansas, whose significant works include a number of experimental long poems such as The Book of the Green Man, RADI OS, and his magnum opus ARK. Johnson graduated from Columbia University 1960, wandered in Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died. Writer and critic Guy Davenport once referred to Johnson as America's greatest living poet, while poet Robert Creeley considered Johnson was "one of the defining peers of [his] own imagined company of poets."

George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.

William Hobart Dickey (December 15, 1928 – May 3, 1994) was an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University. He wrote 15 books of poetry over a career that lasted over 30 years.