Son of a wine merchant and born in London around 1340, Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered as the first truly great English writer and is most well-known for his work The Canterbury Tales. Familiar to literary students across the world, this series of poems recounts the stories of various people whilst on a pilgrimage to […]

Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and went on to win an international reputation for both his writing and his work as a translator. His work has embraced both the fantastical and the surreal, exploring wide ranging topics such as philosophy, religion and what was later called magical realism. […]

At various times a journalist, university lecturer, and even pub landlady, poet Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England. Thanks to a scholarship, she studied literature at Oxford and there began writing poetry, publishing her first collection in the 1950s. After some time working on newspapers in the UK, Joseph moved for a […]

Ask people to name a classical Greek poet and most will probably mention Homer, author of such epic prose as The Iliad and Odyssey. For many, Homer is the beginning of poetry and one of the literary gods who set the standard for the future of literature. Not much is known about when he was […]

Born in Pennsylvania at the end of the 19th Century, John Robinson Jeffers was a narrative and epic poet who believed you needed to dehumanize in order to explore the bigger picture. His father was a minister and his brother later went on to become a respected astronomer. Jeffers was always academically gifted and his […]