We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Felicia Hemans was a 19th century poet of both English and Irish descent although she also considered herself half Welsh later in life. She was a prolific poet who received criticism and praise in almost equal measures. Female poets in the early 19th century were rare and not, generally, well regarded. Felicia Hemans though attracted the attention and admiration of poets such ...
There are conflicting versions of what kind of poet George Bacovia actually was. Initially he was firmly in the Romanian Symbolist camp, progressing later into the realms of Modernism where he received much critical acclaim. Between the two world wars though some saw him as a Neo-Symbolist while others almost dismissed him as a poet lacking in significant ideas. Into the 1950s, ...
Born in 1876 in Gloucestershire, Eva Dobell was a poet and editor who is perhaps best known for her war time poems such as Pluck and Night Duty which were written whilst working as a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment during World War I. She was brought up in a reasonably affluent family with a father who was a respected ...
Born in Pennsylvania in 1896, Esther Popel was an African American poet, writer and activist who was popular for works such as Thoughtless Thinks by a Thinkless Thoughter. Her father was a mailman and encouraged all his children to gain a better education and Popel herself graduated at the age of 18 from the Harrisburg’s Central High School. Popel made history when ...
Born in Wolverhampton in 1875, Evelyn Underhill was a writer and poet who was greatly influenced by the spiritual world and was perhaps best known for her works on the mysticism, particularly that which surrounds Christianity. An only child with a father who was a writer, Underhill spent most of her early days being educated at home before going to a ...
Born in 1917 in Nablus, Fadwa Touqan was one of the most influential poets of her day and wrote extensively about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the hardship it brought to the people. She was born into one of the most influential and well-known families of the country – her younger brother Ibrahim would become ‘the poet of Palestine’ though ...
Born in Ottawa in Canada in 1913, poet and novel writer Elizabeth Smart grew up in a well-known and affluent family, her father a lawyer who regularly mixed with prominent figures of the day. Smart was given the best of starts in life with a good private education and it was no surprise when she became interested in writing, and poetry ...
Florence Anthony was a 20th century, mixed-race American poet who worked hard to create the image of a hard-hitting, uncompromising writer who was never afraid to delve into the murky worlds of sexual exploitation and domestic violence. How much of this is semi-autobiographical is open to conjecture and it is easy to speculate that something (or someone) may have driven her to ...
Erasmus Darwin was a leading figure in 18th century England in the fields of medicine, science, philosophy and poetry. His talents were almost limitless and he was, literally, a larger than life figure of a man who, when visiting patients, used to send his driver ahead of him. The driver, also a large man, would test the strength of the floors in ...
The English poet Elizabeth Daryush attracted a fair amount of criticism for the “proper” language that she used, and the style that she adopted, when writing her poems. She should not be blamed for it though as she grew up during Victorian and Edwardian times where it was perfectly normal for a young woman of her background to write in the way that ...
