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To paraphrase the late, venerable American poetess, Maya Angelou: our nation is a multi-colored ocean, leaping and wide, welling and swelling, we bear the tide.

But they also can take over the image, as in Bronzino’s gorgeous portrait of the distinguished poetess Laura Battiferri, who holds a large volume of Petrarch’s sonnets that absorbs much of the pictorial energy.

These days the word “essayist” sounds fussy and a little old-fashioned, nearly as archaic as “bookman” and “poetess.”

In the first episode, titled “Because I could not stop for Death,” Death is played by Wiz Khalifa, in a fantasy sequence where he smokes the poetess out and also gives her a pep talk.

We have historically added feminine suffixes like “ess” to job titles to denote that a person is female, as in “actress” or the archaic “poetess”.