When most people think of Leonard Cohen they see a moody, gravel-voiced singer-songwriter whose on stage performances have drawn millions around the world since the 1970s and who possesses an enviable back catalogue of album releases. But, like anyone with his talent, he is not just a musician but is also a poet and a novelist. His poetry, like his songs, can ...
Born in 1749, Charlotte Smith was a writer who was most well known for her romantic sonnets. Indeed, she can perhaps be rightly called the first of the romantic poets, influencing those who followed, including William Wordsworth. Outspoken for the time, she once described her early marriage as nothing more than prostitution, but although it was not the happiest of ...
Mention the name Dante and most people think of his Inferno or the complete poetic works that fell under the title Divine Comedy. His real name was Durante degli Alighier, he was one of the most influential poets of the Middle Ages, and his Comedy remains one of the seminal literary works in history. Born around 1265 in Italy, Dante was raised ...
Anyone who has heard the hymn Amazing Grace sung either in a stadium or in church will know the work of poet John Newton who was born in London in 1725. Son of a merchant seaman and trader, he worked aboard slave ships in Africa and the West Indies before becoming an abolitionist in later life. Newton lost his mother to tuberculosis ...
Born in 1926 in Baltimore, Frank O’Hara went on to become the leader of the New York School that boasted such luminaries as John Ashbury, Alice Notley and Kenneth Koch. His poetry, like that of many writers at the time, moved away from the stuffy academic verse of the past to a more musical and immediate style that often reads ...
Armed with a large vocabulary and a disdain for convention, American poet John Ashbury has won almost every major award for his work, including a Pulitzer in 1976. He was born in New York in 1927 but was brought up on a farm near Lake Ontario and began writing poetry at a very early age. Influenced by poetic contemporaries such as ...
Born in 1946 in London at the end of the Second World War, Michael Rosen is most well-known for his large collection of children’s stories and poems. His father was a secondary school teacher and professor of English and his mother worked both as lecturer and for the BBC. Indeed, some of Rosen’s earliest work was broadcast on a series she ...
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1905 Mary Elizabeth Frye is forever associated with her one most memorable poem, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep. She was orphaned at the age of 3 and grew up to become a florist and housewife. She had never written a poem in her life but the obvious heartache of a young woman ...
Born in 1914 in Oklahoma, American poet John Berryman is most well remembered for Dream Songs, a combination of two previous books comprising 365 poems that he felt should be read as one work. Although born in Oklahoma, his parents moved to Florida but tragedy struck early on when Berryman was just 12 years old – his father committed suicide, an ...
Born in New York in 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s life didn’t get off to the best of starts. His father tragically passed away 6 months before his birth and his mother found herself detained in an asylum shortly after he was born. He was brought up by his Aunty Emily, who became his ward and brought him to Strasbourg for the first ...
