Gavrila Derzhavin was a renowned Russian poet, soldier and civil servant who rose to prominence during the reign of Catherine the Great. His work has been compared with that of the great Alexander Pushkin. While some of his poetry was of a classical nature, other elements had metaphysical qualities reminiscent of the Englishman John Donne. Other elements of his work were ...
Gavin Douglas was a Scottish poet, translator of ancient classics and a bishop. He was one of the small group of poets known as The Makars, other members including William Dunbar and Robert Henryson. They wrote in an Anglic language called Middle Scots during the northern renaissance period of the 15th and 16th centuries. Douglas was well known in political and ...
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was an American poet and spiritualist novelist of the second half of the 19th century who was, undoubtedly, a controversial figure. Indeed, she was very much ahead of her time, an example coming during the 1880s when she was a keen advocate of reform for women’s clothing. She openly encouraged her sisters to throw off the shackles of their ...
Veterans Day is coming up and here at My Poetic Side we’re honoring our military veterans the best way we know how: by shining a spotlight on some of our favorite war poets. So as we thank our veterans for their military service, we’ll be curling up with the words of these notable poets.
Walt Whitman – The American Civil War
In ...
David Jones, was a 20th century English poet who was one the early exponents of the British modernist movement. He was also an accomplished watercolour painter, specialising in portraits, religious subjects and landscapes, and an occasional wood engraver. A lifetime of artistic and literary achievements earned if many honours and awards including a Companion of Honour and Companion of the British Empire. ...
Rolando Hinojosa is a Chicano (Mexican-American) writer who is still active well into his 80s. He is sometimes referred to as Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. As well as being a poet, essayist and Professor of English, he is most famous for a lifetime project that he calls Klail City Death Trip, a series of novels now numbering fifteen. The story in each book relates ...
Michael Casey is an American poet who is generally acknowledged as the first poet to address the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way that really spoke to the readers, using humour and candour in equal measure. So many Americans were so detached from the war, both physically and emotionally, and Casey used the language of the soldiers and precise descriptions of events to ...
Professor Brian Turner is an American poet and former soldier. Much of his writing features his experiences fighting as a combat soldier in Iraq and his first collection of poems, called Here, Bullet won him the Beatrice Hawley Award in 2005. Since then he has won many more honours and awards and, in 2010, his second collection (Phantom Noise) was shortlisted for the T ...
Ellis Parker Butler was a much-loved American poet, essayist and short-story writer whose best known piece of work is a cautionary tale called
Pigs is Pigs
concerning an over-fussy railway station master who insists on charging too high a rate for the carriage of two small domestic pets and ends up with a house overrun with the animals. Butler’s literary output was considerable, running ...
Gaius Petronius Arbiter, to give him his full name, was a 1st century AD Roman poet and novelist. He is well known for being a voluptuary, in other words a pleasure seeker, seeking out carnal adventures by night and often sleeping through the day. He was a royal courtier, part of the Emperor Nero’s inner circle, and it is believed that he ...