Poet Ruben Dario was born in Nicaragua in 1867 and was perhaps one of the best exponents of the literary movement modernismo that arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Brought up by an aunt and uncle in Leon, Dario went to several schools and was reading a wide range of books by […]

Born in Belfast in 1907, Louis MacNeice was a poet, greatly influenced by W.H. Auden, who was much loved by his contemporaries and known for his relaxed and honest style. His early life was spent in County Antrim and he was deeply affected by the death of his mother when he was just six years […]

A poet with a taste for the spiritual, Max Ehrmann was born in Indiana in 1872. His parents were from Bavaria and he was educated in the small town of Terre Haute whilst attending a German Methodist church nearby. He is probably best known for his poem Desiderata that has often been quoted and misquoted […]

Of mixed race ancestry, Jean Toomer was born in 1894 and was seen as one of the most important proponents of modernism and a primer mover in the cultural movement the Harlem Renaissance of the time. Although his mother was white, his father’s history was steeped in the slave culture of 19th Century Georgia. In […]

Born in 1819, American poet and critic James Russell Lowell was best known as one of the group of Fireside Poets which included such luminaries as Longfellow and Wendell Holmes. Raised in New England, Lowell went to Harvard and graduated in 1838, although he himself agreed that he was never a good student. In his […]