Poetry blog

We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.

Recent posts

William Vaughn Moody Poems

 

William Vaughn Moody was an American poet, playwright and teacher of English. His life spanned the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and his poetry reflected the changing face of literature at that time, beginning with the traditional styles of old and evolving into the experimental forms of the new century. He taught at Harvard and Radcliffe universities and ...

William Walsh Poems

 

William Walsh was an British poet and also an MP. He was, perhaps, best remembered as a literary critic. His most famous work in that line was with a young poet destined for greatness called Alexander Pope. The two became close and Pope took on board any criticism offered by his friend, thus improving his own work. He was born on the 6th ...

William Warner Poems

 

Little is known about the life of English poet, translator and lawyer William Warner although he made his mark on the history of English literature with his best known piece of work, Albion’s England. He was born sometime during the year 1558 in London. It seems that he had already lost his father by the time of his birth as, in passages from Albion’s ...

William Wetmore Story Poems

 

William Wetmore Story was a US born  art critic, poet, sculptor and essayist. He lived in Italy for much of his life and it was a coincidence that he died in the very place that had inspired him to write an earlier travel journal in 1881. The town, and journal, was called Vallombrosa. He was born on the 12th February 1819,  his father a Massachusetts jurist. ...

William Winter Poems

 

William Winter was an American poet, essayist, theatre critic and biographer. He was born on the 15th July 1836 in the coastal town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Little is known of his formative years other than to say that he attended Harvard Law School and graduated in 1857. Rather than choose a career at the bar he had ambitions to be a writer and he ...

Winifred Mary Letts Poems

 

Winifred Mary Letts was an English poet, novelist and playwright who lived much of her life in Ireland. In 1914 some of her poetry was set to music by the Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford who took six poems and called them A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster. The best known of these is one called A Soft Day. She came into the world ...

CSI: Poetry. The life and death -ok just death- of poets

 

Here at My Poetic Side, we love to explore new topics relating to our poets, so this week we decided to do some sleuthing on something a little more gruesome than usual, putting our CSI hats on and investigating the sometimes-disturbing cause of deaths of some of our favourite poets. Ok, so we know it sounds a little morbid, but it’ll be interesting, we promise! ...

Walter James Redfern Turner Poems

 

The Australian-born poet, playwright, novelist and music critic Walter James Redfern Turner lived in England from his early 20s and it was here that he made his name as a writer, remaining there for the rest of his life apart from a brief spell just before the outbreak of the First World War. He was born on the 13th October 1884 in South Melbourne ...

William Forster Poems

 

William Forster was an Indian-born, Australian poet and politician who wrote a great deal of cutting satire, mostly aimed at the colonial government. He only eased up on these attacks when he took his seat in parliament, serving there for many years. He was acting Premier during a five-month period between 1859-60. He was born on the 16th October 1818 in Madras while ...

Wallace Berman Poems

 

Although Wallace Berman was an occasional American poet he was best known as an “assemblage” artist. In other words, he specialised in three-dimensional art, putting together diverse materials and shapes to create artistic forms. He was actually known as the “father” of 20th century assemblage art. While living in San Francisco he ran a low-circulation but influential arts magazine called Semina which ...