Poetry blog

We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.

Recent posts

Brian Turner Poems

 

Professor Brian Turner is an American poet and former soldier. Much of his writing features his experiences fighting as a combat soldier in Iraq and his first collection of poems, called Here, Bullet won him the Beatrice Hawley Award in 2005. Since then he has won many more honours and awards and, in 2010, his second collection (Phantom Noise) was shortlisted for the T ...

Ellis Parker Butler Poems

 

Ellis Parker Butler was a much-loved American poet, essayist and short-story writer whose best known piece of work is a cautionary tale called Pigs is Pigs concerning an over-fussy railway station master who insists on charging too high a rate for the carriage of two small domestic pets and ends up with a house overrun with the animals. Butler’s literary output was considerable, running ...

Gaius Petronius Poems

 

Gaius Petronius Arbiter, to give him his full name, was a 1st century AD Roman poet and novelist. He is well known for being a voluptuary, in other words a pleasure seeker, seeking out carnal adventures by night and often sleeping through the day. He was a royal courtier, part of the Emperor Nero’s inner circle, and it is believed that he ...

Emily Holmes Coleman Poems

 

Emily Holmes Coleman was an American-born poet, novelist and diarist of the 20th century who lived much of her life in France and England. In 1930 she wrote one remarkable novel called The Shutter of Snow which was the story of a woman incarcerated in a mental hospital. She used her own experience of being similarly confined as valuable research for the novel. She ...

Clinton Scollard Poems

 

Clinton Scollard was an American poet, novelist and teacher of English. He served as Professor of English during the last decade of the 19th century at Hamilton College in New York. He was married twice, the second marriage being to fellow poet Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, with whom he collaborated on a number of writing projects. He was born on the 28th September 1860 in ...

Alfred de Vigny Poems

 

Alfred, the Comte de Vigny, was a 19th century French poet who was at the forefront of the Romantic movement in arts and literature in his country. He was also a novelist, playwright and translator of many of Shakespeare’s works into French. At the age of seventeen his noble background enabled him to be appointed as an army second lieutenant in the ...

Conrad Potter Aiken Poems

 

Conrad Potter Aiken was an American poet, short story writer and novelist of the 20th century who, at the age of 11, survived the tragedy of finding his parent’s bodies after his father had shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself. A multi-prize winning author, his collection of poems called Selected Poems won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. He was ...

Poetry in the 18th century [interactive timeline & timemap]

 

Whether we realise it or not, the things we have experienced in our lives shape our thoughts and our opinions. This is something that a lot of creative people use to their advantage in their works. Everyone from musicians to playwrights to, of course, poets, use their experiences and the things that they have been through when they are putting together their creative masterpieces. This is why, if you assess ...

Constance Fenimore Woolson Poems

 

Constance Fenimore Woolson was a 19th century American poet and novelist who was descended from James Fenimore Cooper, the great writer who told epic tales of frontier and Indian life during the early days of American colonisation. Constance adopted a similar style with her stories featuring the people of the southern states and the Great Lakes regions. She also spent a good deal ...

Giacomo Leopardi Poems

 

Giacomo Leopardi was a 19th century Italian nobleman who was one of the leading lights in the Romantic poetry movement which was a part of the Age of Enlightenment. This was a period that began in the previous century, dominating intellectual and philosophical thinking across the whole of Europe. Leopardi was able to participate fully in this despite living in a remote part ...