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Born in 1877 in Kentucky, Charles Hanson Towne was probably as widely known for his New York urbanite lifestyle as his poetic works. He wanted to become a writer from an early age and even produced a magazine with some of his friends when he was just eleven years old. Not much is known about Towne’s childhood with the exception ...
Born in New South Wales in 1813, Australian poet and writer Charles Harpur was the son of freed convicts who greatly encouraged his education. His father had become a school teacher in the small town of Windsor and exposed his son to the likes of Shakespeare and Milton from an early age. Although not one of Australia’s major poets, Harpur produced ...
Puritan minister Cotton Mather was born in Boston in 1663 and was one of the most influential religious voices, producing a wide range of sermons and writings during colonial days in the Americas. He was born into a family of well-known ministers including his father Increase Mather. He went to the Latin School in Boston before heading to Harvard where he ...
Often remembered more for his political opposition to the Corn Laws rather than as a poet, Ebenezer Elliott was born in Yorkshire in 1781. He would grow up to own a factory at the start of the industrial revolution would be declared bankrupt and register his discontent with the lot of the common man through his poetry. His father was intensely religious, ...
Paruyr Sevag led a relatively short life, cut short by a suspicious car crash, but his work had such an impact that he was considered to be one of the outstanding Armenian poets of the 20th century. From humble beginnings he became a well-educated man who filled university posts at different times as a translating professor and a scientific researcher. He also ...
Aristophanes was one of the greatest Greek playwrights and poets of his time. His most notable skill was probably to be found in some of his comic plays which contained often satirical, and sometimes cruel, barbed comments about Greek society in general and some of the most well-known figures within it. A startling example was found in a play called The ...
Best known by the name Annie Louisa Walker this writer later published work under her married name Annie Louisa Coghill. She was born in England but moved to Canada while a young girl, remaining there for about ten years before returning to her homeland. She was primarily an author of fiction but also published at least two collections of poetry. Much ...
Anne Ridler was one of England’s finest 20th century poets who was heavily influenced, and indeed mentored by, T S Eliot. She had a number of collections of poetry published along with several verse dramas which were performed across the south of England around the period of the Second World War. It was hard to find stage plays being performed at ...
Ann Radcliffe was a late 18th/early 19th century English writer who lived a somewhat reclusive life, to the extent that very little has been written about her. It has been said that she was one of the pioneers of the “gothic novel”. Others had written in this style before her but she had a way of explaining the supernatural as, in general ...
Born in Plymouth in the South of England in 1840, poet Henry Austin Dobson became one of the most distinguished writers of the 19th Century with works such as At the Sign of the Lyre as well as a series of later biographies of influential writers. His father was an engineer with French ancestry and the family moved to Anglesey in ...
