We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Aeschylus was the first exponent of the dramatic form now known as “The Greek Tragedy”. It has been said that the idea of writing tragedies came to him in a dream when ordered to do so by Dionysus, the God of the Grape Harvest. This occurred during an episode where the young Aeschylus was sent out from the city to watch grapes ...
Poet, critic and writer, Sterling A Brown was born in Washington in 1901 and was one of the foremost voices of African-American literature in the 20th Century as well as one of its greatest teachers. His father had been a slave and worked his way to become a minister and professor at Howard University which has played a major role ...
French poet and follower of the symbolist movement, Stephane Mallarme was born in Paris in 1842. A huge inspiration for the many writers and poets that followed, he was one of the major innovating forces in art in the mid to late 19th Century, although he spent much of his life in poverty. Born into a comfortable, middle class family, he was ...
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 ...
