We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
American poet Edgar Albert Guest was born in 1881 but went on to become wildly known as the People’s Poet, a reflection of the optimistic nature of his life’s work and his popularity. He was born in Birmingham, England, but came to the US at the age of 10 and soon after became a naturalized citizen. A newspaper man by profession, ...
Nâzım Hikmet has been described as the first modern Turkish poet. He was born Nâzım Hikmet Ran in 1902 in Salonika which was, at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire but is now Thessaloníki in Greece. His father was a civil servant with the Foreign Service. Nâzım was probably steered towards poetry by his grandfather, who was a poet himself, and ...
John Greenleaf Whittier was born on the 17th December 1807 in Massachusetts to a farming Quaker family. His was a poor upbringing. The farm made little money but had to support Whittier’s extended family plus farm employees. He suffered ill-health throughout his life. Despite a lack of formal education he was an avid reader of books and fell in love ...
Born in 1898, in a little town called Fuente Vaqueros which is not far from the southern Spanish city of Granada, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca became one of his country’s most celebrated poets. His talents extended to writing plays as well as directing them and he was a part of the famous Generación del 27, a group of ...
Born in the middle of the 16th Century, Edmund Spenser was a poet who managed to portray a distinctive voice at a time when classical literature as we know it in England was still in its formative stages. He is probably best known for an unfinished epic poem, steeped in allegory, entitled The Faerie Queene that is also notable for being ...
Born out of Moscow’s nobility in 1799, Alexander Pushkin has long been thought of as the founding father of Russian literature and one the greatest poets of all time. For a man who barely lived 38 years before his untimely death, following an ill judged duel in 1937, it is a testament to his poetic vitality that he is still much ...
Considered to be the greatest modernist Russian woman poet she was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko on June 23rd 1889 in Bolshoy Fontan, close to the port of Odesa, on the Black Sea. Her father was a naval engineer named Andrey Antonovich Gorenko, and her mother was named Inna Erazmovna Stogova, and both were said to be descended from Russian nobility. The family ...
Looking at the picture of Spike Milligan (1918-2002) one can hardly deny the presence of a laugh behind the eyes and smile. Completely severed from the classical poets such as Milton and Donne, and estranged from modern poets, Milligan has been mostly viewed as a poetic comic rather than a serious poet. This conclusion is not without some merit. His works, apart ...
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) started writing poetry at a young age. From the repetition in the art of poetry her work is vast and well known. As an African American poet who grew up in Chicago, Illinois, during a time of strong racial contrasts, her work has become inspirational to a great many people. Her talents in poetry marked her as the first ...
American writer, poet and clergyman Henry Van Dyke was born in 1852 in Germantown, in the State of Pennsylvania. His father was a member of the Presbyterian church and, as a minister, was the main influence on the young Van Dyke in his formative years. As well as two nationally known stories for Christmas, The Other Wise Man and The ...
