Zora Bernice May Cross was an Australian poet, teacher, journalist, occasional actor and novelist. Her love-sonnets shocked some, being much too explicit for the time, with other subjects including child birth and war also covered. In contrast she wrote a number of charming poems for children. She was born on the 18th May 1890 at Eagle Farm, Brisbane. Her parents were second generation settlers, ...
William Roscoe was an English poet whose most famous piece of work was a children’s poem called The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast. He had strong religious beliefs, as a Unitarian and Presbyterian, and he was a leading campaigner for the abolition of slavery. He spoke out vehemently against this trade even though his home town prospered on it. At different times ...
William Shenstone was an 18th century British poet and landscape gardener. He can be recalled alongside the famous Capability Brown as one of the first landscape gardeners, with Shenstone being responsible for significant work that was carried out at his estate near Halesowen, The Leasowes, which lies in England’s West Midlands. He was born on the 18th November 1714 at Leasowes into very comfortable ...
William Sharp was a Scottish poet, novelist and biographer of other literary figures such as Walter Scott and Charles Swinburne. He edited their poetry, along with the likes of Ossian, Eugene Lee-Hamilton and Matthew Arnold. While he wrote using his own name, much of his work was written using the pseudonym Fiona Macleod. He was born on the 12th September 1855 in Paisley, ...
The slightly exotically named William Shakespeare Hays was an American poet and also a prolific song writer, credited with over 350 songs which sold in their millions. One of the most famous songs that he may, or may not, have written was the classic Dixie and Hays certainly laid strong claims to it (mostly unsubstantiated). The controversy over ownership of it rumbled ...
Colonel William Stewart Hawkins was an American Confederate soldier poet of the Civil War era whose life was tragically cut short soon after being released from captivity. While he was incarcerated he wrote about the suffering of the men in his charge, for they had elected him their leader and representative. He wrote at least two poems of great poignancy at this ...
William Strode was a 17th century English poet and Doctor of Divinity. He hailed from the south west county of Devon and, thus, warranted an entry in John Prince’s huge tome that he called The Worthies of Devon, a major work published in 1701 to celebrate the major figures that came out of that county. Some doubt surrounds his birth date; records suggest that ...
William Taylor Collins was an 18th century English poet whose literary influence has placed him, according to historians, second only to Thomas Gray amongst leading poets of that time. Up to then much English poetry had been of the Augustan type as written by Alexander Pope and others. Collins introduced a more lyrical style that ushered in the Romantic era that ...
Winifred Coombe Tennant was an English-born poet, Liberal politician and spiritualist who, as time went by, became an adopted Welsh person through her life-long campaigning on behalf of the Welsh-Nationalist Eisteddfod movement. It has been long accepted that the people of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany share cultural traditions and those involved in the literary and artistic side of things usually have a “bardic name”. ...
William Vallans was a poet, salter and antiquarian who hailed from England. There is very little recorded about his life but it is believed that he was born sometime during the mid- to late-16th century, in the Hertfordshire town of Ware. Although he grew up working in the businesses of trading antiques and salt, he enjoyed writing poetry and had a poem called A ...
