Frost, Robert (1874-1963). American poet and educator. Cather recognized and praised Frost's first two volumes of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913; 1915 in the U.S.) and North of Boston (1914 in both England and the U.S.) as early as 1915. She wrote him a letter of admiration that year in which she recognized the combination of newness with traditional elements that is still regarded as characteristic of Frost's work. After having met Frost and his wife, she attended a dinner in honor of his birthday in 1925. Like Cather, Frost is often seen as a transitional figure between late-Victorian and modernist styles. He used traditional forms and meter and his primary subject matter was rural New England, but he wrote with a directness and use of vernacular that identifies him with the "New American Poetry." Frost taught at Amherst College (Amherst, MA) from 1916 to 1938 and was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry.

Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148 Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character, which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."

Coates, Florence Van Leer Earle Nicholson (1850-1927). American popular poet. Born in Philadelphia, PA, eldest daughter of lawyer George H. Earle and Frances Van Leer Earle, Florence Earle was educated in New England and in Paris. In 1872 she married William Nicholson; they had one daughter, Alice, before his death in 1877. She married Edward H. Coates in 1879. Matthew Arnold, on lecture tours in America, became a friend and encouraged her to write. Florence Coates’ poems began appearing frequently in respected magazines in the 1890s, and collections were published in 1898, 1904, 1909, and 1912, with a two volume collected edition in 1916. Her themes were love and nature, with patriotic poems during and after World War I. Cather mentions her disparagingly in a letter to Robert Frost.

Scollard, Jessie B. Rittenhouse (1869-1948). American anthologist and poet. After working as a teacher, book reviewer, and reporter in western New York, Rittenhouse moved to Boston, MA, in 1899 and to New York City in 1905 to pursue a literary career. She published several volumes of verse and several anthologies and reviewed poetry for the New York Times Review of Books. In 1914 she was one of the founders of the Poetry Society of America. Her anthology, The Little Book of Modern Verse (1913), included Cather’s “Grandmither, Think Not I Forget,” for which Cather made some revisions. Rittenhouse married poet Clinton Scollard in 1924.

Milton, John (1608-1674). English poet. Born in London, England, Milton received his BA (1629) and MA (1632) from Cambridge University; his first published poem, on Shakespeare, was written while at university. He spent six years of intensive study on his own, then traveled abroad, spending time in Rome, Italy, and Geneva, Switzerland. The English Civil War was brewing when he returned to England, and he wrote tracts and pamphlets attacking practices in the Anglican Church and defending Parliament’s execution of Charles I. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton, by then totally blind, went into retirement and wrote his greatest works, Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671). Cather read Milton in her youth and refers to his works in several of her books, most notably in One of Ours (1922).