We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Henry Kirke White was a poet whose output of religiously themed poems, many of which were sung as hymns, is remarkable in that most of it was written while he was still a teenager. Like many others at that time his health was poor and the onset of tuberculosis meant that he never saw his 22nd birthday. He was born on the 21st March ...
Harold Monro was a Belgium-born English poet. Although he wrote poems about the First World War, and particularly about men that he knew involved in it, he could not be described as a “war poet” as such. Besides writing his own work he opened the Poetry Bookshop in London, in 1913, and, over the next twenty years, this became an establishment that ...
Henry Sambrooke Leigh was a fairly minor English poet and playwright of the 19th century. He was known for his lyric writing, and tuneful singing, of humorous songs and for a number of translations of French comic operas into English, many of which appeared on the London stage. Critics have praised him for his “fluent verse” but, at the same time, his ...
Harriet Prescott Spofford was a New England poet and novelist who made a name for herself writing tales of the supernatural and some detective stories. She was born Harriet Elizabeth Prescott on the 3rd April 1835 in Maine. Her family were closely connected with seafaring and this theme appeared in a number of her stories. Although they were reasonably well off, Harriet was sent ...
Hartley Burr Alexander, PhD was an American writer, academic, philosopher and iconographer. He was born on the 9th April 1873 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a minister in the Methodist church who was also edited a newspaper. As he grew up in Syracuse the young man developed his own interest in writing, influenced by his father, but shied away from the church. He ...
Hazel Hall was an American poet whose short life spanned the end of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th centuries. She was born on the 7th February 1886 in Saint Paul, a Minnesota town that had been nominated some years earlier as the capital of the Minnesota territory. She was only a few years old though when the family moved ...
James Brunton Stephens was a Scottish-born Australian poet, although he did not emigrate there until his early thirties. His most famous piece of work was a long poem called Convict Once, a piece that established his name in the annals of great Australian writers and demonstrated that he could show a great deal of patriotism toward his adopted country. He also served for ...
Helene Johnson was a 20th century African-American poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. This was a movement of great artistic and cultural innovation which came out of the Harlem district of New York during the 1920s and was also known as the “New Negro Movement”. She was born Helen Johnson on the 7th July 1906 in Boston although she spent ...
Henry Constable was an English poet and diplomat of the late 16th and early 17th centuries whose most famous work was the remarkable sequence of sonnets under the title Diana, split into eight sections which he called First Decade, Second Decade and so on. He led a trouble life in his later years due to his conversion to Catholicism, a declaration of ...
Henrik Arnold Wergeland was a 19th century Norwegian writer who openly courted controversy, in both the poems and the plays that he wrote. He lived only a short life but in his time became known as a pioneer of Norwegian literature covering a wide range of topics including social issues, theology and modern politics. Some historians have described his work as “subversive” ...
