We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
For those who don't know what a clerihew is, let me define it this way: it is simply four lines of whimsical, biographical verse. Perhaps one of the most famous of these is as follows: Sir Christopher Wren Said, "I am going to dine with some men. If anyone calls Say I am designing St. Paul's." This untitled poem, as most clerihews are, was penned by ...
When I was a young man, I was greatly influenced by watching nature specials on television, and in particular, the adventures of Jacque Cousteau and his famous ship, Calypso. My dream was to join some research team and travel deep along the Amazon or find myself working at a research center on the Galapagos Islands. David Whyte has done all of ...
I first learned of Roger McGough when I was working on my teaching certification. One of my mentors told me about a rather frightening poem that McGough had composed regarding how frustrated teachers might sometimes be tempted to behave in the classroom. Of course, the poem was intended as a witty, albeit dark, satire, not as a recommended course of action for ...
[caption id="attachment_3506" align="alignleft" width="224"] Charles Ghigna[/caption] People enjoy poetry for a multitude of reasons. For some of us, poetry serves as a means of sharing emotions and experiences, while others enjoy it for admiring the craftiness of poets' and observing their ability to manipulate words and phrases. Still others find poetry to be of significant source of inspiration in times of trial ...
Alexander Pope's witty and pointed poetic satire brought him infamy during his lifetime. It has also made critical evaluation of Pope in the years since his death more prone to interpretation based on the critic's personal feelings about such satire than perhaps any other poet in history. Pope was born the only child of Alexander and Edith Pope in 1688. The ...
Irish balladeer, singer, and poet Thomas Moore gained fame in the first half of the nineteenth century both as a poet and as a society figure whose scandalous behavior may have overshadowed his talents. Thomas Moore was born in 1779 in Dublin, Ireland, over his father"s grocery business. Moore was one of the first Catholic students allowed entry to Trinity College in ...
Poet Robert Lowell"s turbulent journey in life is echoed in the more personal of his poetry. Robert Lowell was born in 1917, the son of the famous Lowells of Boston, a family that already boasted two poets, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. He followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, but after two years - and upon the advice of his ...
Poet Amy Lowell's literary reputation, marred in her lifetime due to her lifestyle and at times overbearing personality, has in recent years begun to improve as new generations of readers have rediscovered her work. Born in 1874 in Brookline Massachusetts, Amy Lowell was the daughter of a prominent New England family, one that encouraged her love of reading and writing. She ...
One of the lions of American poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's verses have endured across centuries to become some of the best known and best loved in the English language. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, the son of wealthy parents, his father an attorney. From childhood, Longfellow was preoccupied with words and writing, and even as a ...
While D.H. Lawrence is known to modern audiences primarily as a novelist and short story writer, the author's initial forays into literature were his poems. Born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885, David Herbert Lawrence's childhood was spent around the colleries of the Eastwood area, where his father and most of the other men in his family worked as miners. Although Lawrence ...
