Christopher Smart was an 18th century English poet who wrote for various popular magazines using a number of pseudonyms such as “Kit Smart”, “Kitty Smart”, and “Jack Smart”, and he also adopted the persona of midwife “Mrs. Mary Midnight”. He was best known though for his high spiritual ideals, bordering on religious fanaticism at times. […]

Richard Aldington was an English poet, novelist and biographer and is one of the 16 First World War poets whose name appears on a stone in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.  In addition to a volume of war poetry he published a novel in 1929 about the war called Death of a Hero.  His popularity took […]

Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet of the 16th century who enjoyed the privileged position throughout most of his adult life of being a favoured poet of the Kings of France. He was generally accepted as the leading writer amongst a group of Renaissance poets called La Pléiade, a collection of talented poets of […]

Stephen Vincent Benét was an American writer who packed a great deal into his relatively short lifetime which spanned the first half of the 20th century. Remarkably he had his first collection of poems published when aged only 17 and his final, epic piece of work (Western Star), won him the Pulitzer Prize even though […]

Robert E Howard was, in his very short life time, responsible for the creation of pulp fiction characters that are still “alive” today, over seventy years after he created them. He was an American writer of fictional novels but he also dabbled in fantastical poetry, sometimes in standard verse but also in “prose” form. Many […]