Born in Michigan in 1908, Theodore Roethke was one of the major poetic voices of the first half of the 20th Century and was awarded the Pulitzer in 1954. His father had immigrated to America and was an accomplished gardener, and the young Roethke spent much of the time in his family’s large greenhouse, something that influenced his sense of imagery ...
Noted for his dark satires and parodies, American poet and author Richard Brautigan was born in Washington in 1935. Raised in a working class family, his father left home before the young Brautigan was born, though his mother had begun living with another man by the time he was four years old. His real father would never learn that his son ...
Marianne Moore was an accomplished American writer who, throughout her long life, had the advantage of being popular amongst her readers but was also revered by her writing contemporaries and the literary critics. Her technical ability with the language was often noted; while sometimes her poetry did not scan in a conventional sort of way it was still considered to be technically ...
When driving in southern England, and crossing the border into the county of Hampshire, you cannot fail to notice that the road signs refer to “Jane Austen Country”. Such is the esteem that this writer who died nearly two hundred years ago is still held in these parts. There is “Jane Austen” history almost everywhere you look, especially in the eastern parts ...
Andre Breton was the French founder of surrealism, a revolutionary movement which began in the 1920s aiming to blur the lines between reality and dreams, allowing free-form expression of ideas. He moved away from Dadaism, which itself began during World War One as an irrational, nonsensical expression of anti-war rhetoric. Along with Louis Aragon and Phillippe Soupault, Breton co-founded a journal called ...
A vociferous activist on behalf of the Aborigine people, Oodgeroo Noonucca was born Kathleen Ruska in 1920 and is noted as one of Australia’s most prominent poets. She was the first person from Aboriginal origins to publish poetry and she was one of the key people involved in changing the Australian constitution that gave more rights to the country’s indigenous and ...
Born in 1895 in London, Robert Graves is perhaps one of Britain’s most successful and best loved poets and novelists of the 20th Century. Perhaps better known for his historical novels such as I, Claudius and his war memoir Good-Bye To All That, he was also a prolific poet and critic. For a man who lived to the grand old age of ...
Sir Walter Raleigh, featured in the BBC’s poll of 100 Greatest Britons in 2002, was best known for introducing the potato and tobacco to Britain. This has not been proven, though he did do much to promote the popularity of pipe smoking at the court of Queen Elizabeth the First. Born around 1552 in Devon, England, the product of his father Walter’s third ...
Although William Ernest Henley was a poet he was, in truth, better known as an editor and critic. He was, in fact, unknown as a poet until his 36th year and confessed himself “unmarketable” as a poet prior to 1887. Whether his generally poor health from boyhood up to then had anything to do with it is uncertain, but there is no ...
Gabriela Mistral became a cultural icon amongst all Hispanic people in 1945 when she became the first Spanish American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her writing was influenced greatly by her humble beginnings in Chile which saw her family living in poverty. She became well known as a poet who wrote with a great deal of love and respect for ...
