We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Born around 1728 in County Longford in Ireland, Oliver Goldsmith was a poet and novelist who is perhaps best known for his poem The Deserted Village that rails against the collection of wealth for wealth’s sake and the move of people away from rural areas into the cities. Goldsmith went to study in Dublin at Trinity College when he was just 16 ...
Born in 1933, Romanian poet and essay writer Nichita Stanescu grew up under the influence of World War II and the subsequent rise of communism across the Easter Block. Probably more famous in his own country than the rest of the world, never the less Stanescu remains one of the more important figures of literature in the 20th Century. Stanescu spent most ...
Born in 1809 in Bredfield, England, Edward FitzGerald was a poet and writer and is perhaps most famous for his translation of the Persian work The Rubáiyát of Khayyám. He was raised in a wealthy family and spent part of his youth in Paris before attending school in Bury St Edmunds and then going onto Cambridge University in 1826. FitzGerald made friends ...
Born in 1919, Primo Levi was a writer and poet, a Jew born in Italy who survived the holocaust of World War II. Imprisoned in Auschwitz, perhaps his most well-known work was If This is a Man which was an account of his time there. He was brought up and schooled in Turin where his father worked in the manufacturing business. Levi ...
A Jewish poet and writer in the dark days of Nazi rule, Nelly Sachs was born in Berlin in 1891. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer and was very protective of her. Sachs suffered ill health in her childhood that meant she was tutored at home for much of the time. Her early life as a shy woman who lived a sheltered ...
Poet, writer, editor and translator Eugenio Montale was born October 12th 1896 in Genoa, Italy as the youngest of six sons. When he was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 the Swedish Academy called him: ‘one of the most important poets of the contemporary West.’ His translator Jonathan Galassi said: “his poems have, for thousands of readers, expressed something essential about our age.” Montale ...
Austrian poet, writer and pharmacist Georg Trakl was one of the expressionist poets. Expressionism gained momentum with 20th century European poets. It draws on raw emotion; sometimes dramatic, apocalyptic even, dealing with the tragedy and darkness of the human condition. It rejected the previous romanticism, eroticism and religious idealism in favour of death, loneliness and catastrophe. His writing was said to be ...
The Polish-Lithuanian Adam Mickiewicz is still regarded by many Polish people as their national poet even though he died in 1855. Such was his reputation throughout the Slavic countries that monuments were erected in his honour in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. He is also known as Adomas Bernardas Mickevicius which is the Lithuanian equivalent. He was a prolific writer of poetry ...
Alan Seeger had only a short life. He was an idealist with, some might say, an unrealistically romantic view of death. He wrote a poem, which has become his most famous piece of work, called I Have a Rendezvous with Death. We will never know if he really and truly believed these words at the time that he wrote it but ...
Born in Essex in 1906, Kathleen Raine was a poet and critic whose work had a profoundly spiritual sense that encompassed all forms of belief including Plato, Jesus and Buddha. Her time spent in Northumberland during World War I was a formative part of her life, as were the Scottish ballads and poems that were handed down to her by her ...
