We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
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 ...
William Vaughn Moody was an American poet, playwright and teacher of English. His life spanned the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and his poetry reflected the changing face of literature at that time, beginning with the traditional styles of old and evolving into the experimental forms of the new century. He taught at Harvard and Radcliffe universities and ...
William Walsh was an British poet and also an MP. He was, perhaps, best remembered as a literary critic. His most famous work in that line was with a young poet destined for greatness called Alexander Pope. The two became close and Pope took on board any criticism offered by his friend, thus improving his own work. He was born on the 6th ...
Little is known about the life of English poet, translator and lawyer William Warner although he made his mark on the history of English literature with his best known piece of work, Albion’s England. He was born sometime during the year 1558 in London. It seems that he had already lost his father by the time of his birth as, in passages from Albion’s ...
William Wetmore Story was a US born art critic, poet, sculptor and essayist. He lived in Italy for much of his life and it was a coincidence that he died in the very place that had inspired him to write an earlier travel journal in 1881. The town, and journal, was called Vallombrosa. He was born on the 12th February 1819, his father a Massachusetts jurist. ...
