We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
American poet Larry Levis, born September 30th 1946 in Fresno California, grew up enjoying a rural life of tractor driving and tending grapevines. These experiences, among the Mexican migrant workers on the family farm and later among the tough steel-workers, would influence much of his semi-surrealist poetry. The California landscape in particular would come to have a deep and lasting effect on ...
Born in 1889 in Narbonne, Pierre Reverdy was the epitome of the French poet, influenced by the cubist and surrealist movements of the early 20th Century, and given to exploring loneliness and fear for the spiritual side of life. He was once hailed as the ‘greatest poet alive’ by ardent surrealists and he remains an important figure in world literature with ...
Francis Scott Key, the man who would go on to write the lyrics to the Star- Spangled Banner, was born into a wealthy family in Maryland on August 1st 1779. His father was Captain John Ross Key and his mother was Ann Phoebe Penn Dagworthy. His paternal grandparents were originally from London, England. The family owned a plantation at Terra Rubra, which ...
Multi-award winning American poet and essayist Howard Nemerov was the product of an art-loving family. His father David and mother Gertrude were connoisseurs of art and photography and his sister Diane became a famous photographer. He was the Poet Laureate to the United States from 1988 to 1990, having in 1963/64 been poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and Chancellor of the ...
The Italian writer Cesare Pavese lived a relatively short life spanning the first half of the 20th century. He was a poet and literary critic and was responsible for translating a great deal of English and American literature into Italian – many of these translations were seen in Italian for the first time. He was well regarded as one of the leading ...
Born in Vaucluse in 1907, René Char was a member of the French surrealist movement and was one the enduring poets of the 20th Century. The fourth born and youngest in a well to do family, his father was the mayor of the district and an influential business man. Most of Char’s early life was spent in the palatial grounds of ...
Charles Lamb was an English literary figure from the late 18th and early 19th century who was described by his biographer, E V Lucas, as “the most lovable figure in English literature”. He was a contemporary of famous English writers Samuel T Coleridge and William Wordsworth and Lamb collaborated with both at different times on the publication of his poems and ...
Allen Tate was a member of the so-called Southern Agrarians, a group of twelve American poets, social commentators and writers who shared a common belief in the promotion of southern attitudes in literature, politics and agrarianism. Throughout the depression years in the 1920s and 1930s they were responsible for reviving long lost southern literature and writing new chapters in the story. He ...
Born in Maryland in 1913, Karl Shapiro was one of the youngest recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and was famous for denigrating his university in Virginia as a place where both blacks and Jews were treated with disdain. Shapiro’s early work was stoutly traditionalist but he quickly fell out of love with it, believing that it eventually stifled the creativity of ...
Born in Wisconsin in 1903, Lorine Niedecker was a poet influenced by the early work of the surrealists and imagists who became part of a loosely connected group of artists who were known as objectivists. Niedecker spent a large part of her life in the same rural setting, close to Lake Koshkronong, working in many jobs including a librarian and a ...
