Poetry blog

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

Recent posts

Albert Verwey Poems

 

Albert Verwey was a notable Dutch poet and literary historian who became associated with the great literature movement throughout the Low Countries at the end of the 19th century known as the “Movement of Eighty”, named after the decade in which it happened (i.e.1880). He went on to establish himself as a major figure in the literary life of his country ...

Albert Samain Poems

 

Albert Samain was a 19th century French writer who belonged to the “symbolist” school of writers and artists. This movement had its origins in France, Belgium and Russia and its exponents wrote from the perspective of telling the absolute truth in their poetry without making it too obvious that they were doing so. Samain wrote in a typically descriptive style that explored ...

Alec de Candole Poems

 

Born in 1897 in Cheltheham, Alec de Candole is perhaps one of the lesser known war poets who produced work during the 1914-18 conflict known as The Great War. De Candole was barely out of his teens when he joined the army in 1917 and was only 21 when he met his death at Bonningues in France the following year. His ...

Aleksandër Stavre Drenova Poems

 

Albanian poet Aleksandër Stavre Drenova was born in 1872 in the small village of Drenovë and was most noted for his verse collections such as Sun Rays and Psalms of a Monk. He wrote under the pen name of Asdreni and spent much of his early life with his father who died when he Drenova was just thirteen. From then on, ...

Alexander Blok Poems

 

Born in 1880 in St Petersburg, Alexander Blok was an influential lyric poet and one of the leading lights of the Russian Symbolist Movement. His father taught law at Warsaw University and from very early on the young Blok was surrounded by literary types and an intellectual family environment that influenced him greatly. When his parents divorced, he went to live with ...

Yanka Kupala Poems

 

Yanka Kupala, sometimes written as Janka Kupala, was the pen name used by a Belarussian poet born in the late 19th century. He grew up to be regarded among the greatest of writers using the Belarussian language and was a great supporter of the partisan fighters fighting in his country against the Nazis during the second world war. Some of his early writing ...

William Wilfred Campbell Poems

 

William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who was, for a time, an Anglican minister. His brief spell in the ministry dramatically affected his views on religion and he demonstrated this with a controversial series of articles in the Toronto Globe which attracted a great deal of negative reaction from the paper’s readers. ...

William Waring Cuney Poems

 

This 20th century American poet was known among his friends and contemporaries as Waring Cuney. He was musically trained and could have become a singer, but he chose to pursue a career in literature instead. His poetry is, in many ways, influenced by his musical training, with blues and ballad forms often appearing in his verse. His status as one of the ...

Alexander Bestuzhev Poems

 

Alexander Bestuzhev lived a relatively short life in 19th century Russia and became known, towards the end of his life, as a poet of “florid Romanticism”. Some compared his work to that of great European writers such as Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. He tended to exaggerate his characters and often favoured medieval jousting scenarios in both ...

Victor Hugo Poems

 

One of the true literary giants of the 19th Century, Victor Hugo was born in 1802 in Besancon in France and was a leading dramatist in the Romantic Movement of the century. He was born into an age of huge turmoil with the rise of the Napoleonic era that created family divides, his father a high ranking official in the army ...