Introduction

Rita Dove was born in the known mainly as the center of the tire manufacturing industry in the city of Akron, Ohio; her father was the first black chemist who was able to break through racial barriers in the tire industry. In 1970 she was one of the hundred best American high school graduates of the Year for “Presidential Scholar” appointed and the White House invited, where Richard Nixon refused, however, to give her and her Mitgeehrten hand, as she offered him a resolution of protest against the Vietnam War tried to bring.

She studied English and German at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and was graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude. Then two semesters followed by a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tuebingen, before she accepted an assistantship at the cradle of creative writing programs in American universities, the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa, where in 1977 the MA (Master of Fine Arts) graduating. A year earlier, in 1976, she met the German writer Fred Viebahn, who spent a semester as a guest of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After graduating, she lived with Viebahn in Oberlin, Ohio, for two years while he taught in the German department of Oberlin College. They married there in the spring of 1979, then lived for half a year in Israel and then, after an extensive stay, a year in West Berlin. In the summer of 1981, Rita Dove as an assistant professor of creative writing at Arizona State University and moved with her husband back into the United States. The daughter Aviva was born in 1983 in Phoenix, Arizona. Publications in journals and anthologies had already directed some attention to the young African-American poet, published as Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980 her first book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner. This was followed by Museum (1983) and Thomas and Beulah (1986), both also from Carnegie-Mellon. For Thomas and Beulah, a sequence of linked content, the life of her maternal grandparents inspired poems, received the 1987 Rita Dove Pulitzer Prize. Thomas and Beulah in 1989 as a one-hour television movie produced and aired repeatedly on PBS. This paper discusses Rita Dove's book “Thomas and Beulah: Poems” in a holistic context.

Discussion and Analysis

Rita Dove earned a degree in English 1973 (Creative Writing) at Miami University of Ohio and then spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tuebingen. Her master's degree (MFA - Master of Fine Arts) made in 1977 at the University of Iowa. From 1977 to 1981, she traveled extensively and spent some time as a freelance writer based in Oberlin (Ohio), Dun Laoghaire (Ireland), West Berlin and Jerusalem (Israel). From 1981 to 1989 Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University. Since 1989 she has taught poetry writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she has held since 1993 the chair as Commonwealth Professor of English. Since 1979 she is with the German ...