We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
The famous 19th century American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe was best known for her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was published in 1852. This gripping story about the terrible conditions that African-Americans were subjected to at that time was a great motivator for other abolitionists like her, especially in the northern states of America. Those in the southern states often took ...
Bulgarian poet and writer, Hristo Smirnenski was born in the small town of Kukush in Macedonia, then a region of the Ottoman Empire before later becoming part of Greece. His poor upbringing in an area that was often prone to militancy led to the growth of his socialist ideals and would color his poetry through his teens and early years. Despite ...
Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli was born at a commune in the province of Forli-Cesena in 1855. He was brought up in a large but wealthy family and his father helped to administer an estate of farm land for the Princes Torlonia. Tragedy struck while Pascoli was just twelve years old when his father was shot and killed by an unknown assassin. The ...
Considered as one of the most influential poets to come out of Greece in the 20th Century, Giorgos Seferis was born in 1900 in Urla, a town near the ancient city of Smyrna. He came from an educated family and his father was a lawyer and poet with his own reputation, allied to the political movement called Venizelism, all of which ...
David Gascoyne was an English poet whose life spanned a good deal of the 20th century. He achieved the status of published poet at the remarkably young age of 16 with his collection called Roman Balcony and Other Poems. Incredibly, only one year later, he followed that up with a novel called Opening Day. He was one of the surrealist group of ...
English poet George Gascoigne was born around 1535 in Bedfordshire. He part of the Elizabethan court for a while, thought largely unsuccessful, and was a soldier who fought in the Low Countries of Belgium and France including the Middleburg Siege of 1572. He was a poet of some repute and his works helped in the deification of the Queen which saw ...
Charles of Orléans was born in Paris in 1394. A nobleman with several titles in addition to Duke of Orléans, he was also an accomplished poet and it is believed that he wrote hundreds of poems while incarcerated as a prisoner of war for some twenty five years. This long period of imprisonment was at the hands of the English who had ...
English poet George Barker was born in the Loughton, Essex, in 1913 and is considered one of the livelier characters of 20th century literature. T.S. Eliot said Barker was a genius and his life was often as turbulent and extravagant as his verse, fathering fifteen children over his life time by different partners. Although he is barely remembered in the ...
The French poet Benjamin Péret was one of the founders of the French Surrealist movement in art. He employed surrealist automatism in his writing, which probably sat well with his membership of the Parisian Dadaist movement which he joined after the end of the First World War. Dadaists were European avant-garde writers and artists who concentrated on experimental and innovative methods of ...
Garcilaso de la Vega was a 16th century Spanish poet and soldier whose love of the military life was to be his undoing. His life was cut short in his mid-thirties following wounds sustained at a battle in southern France in 1536. As well as being a renowned soldier of the Kings “Imperial Guard” he was also an innovative writer. He was ...
