Born in Bogota, Columbia, in 1865, Jose Asuncion Silva was a poet who, through his tragic life, is regarded as having helped to found the modernist movement in South America. He was brought up in a wealthy and privileged environment and given a good education that instilled in him an early love of poetry. Silva […]

Born in 1857 in East Renfrewshire, Scotland, poet and dramatist John Davidson was a popular writer, particularly famous for his ballads and a number of humorous plays such as Scaramouch in Naxos. His father was a minister and the family moved to Greenock when Davidson was five. He later attended the Highlanders’ Academy leaving when […]

Born in 1736 in Ruthven, Scotland, James Macpherson is mostly well-known for his translation of the epic Ossian poems of his native land but was also an accomplished poet in his own right and a leading political figure of the time. Born into a reasonably wealthy family, Macpherson traveled to Aberdeen in his teens where […]

Whilst Chaucer may be the most remembered writer of this era, John Gower was also a noted poet and is known for three epic poems that were both moral and political comments on the times. Born in Kent around 1330, nothing much is known about Gower’s early life although it is thought that he was […]

American John Hall Wheelock was born in Far Rockway, New York, in 1886 to an affluent family, his ancestor having built Dartmouth College. He was a poet influenced by the works of Swinburne and Robinson, and wrote on the time honored themes of romance, society and nature. Wheelock often described his poetry as works that […]