Sir George Etherege was well known as a 17th century English poet and playwright. He wrote light, witty plays such as The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub, which appeared in 1664, and also a typically “Dandy” production of the times, The Man of Mode or, Sir Fopling Flutter in 1676. He was born sometime during the year 1636 in the Berkshire town of Maidenhead. His ...
Sir Gilbert Parker, PC and 1st Baronet, was a Canadian poet and novelist who also made a name for himself in British politics and as a skilled propagandist during the First World War. He was born Horatio Gilbert George Parker on the 23rd November 1862 in Ontario, to an Army Captain. He was schooled initially in Ottawa before going on to University in Toronto. He went ...
Sir Henry Parkes, was an English-born poet who, after early struggles in his homeland, took his new wife to Australia in 1839 in search of a better life for the two of them. He had already shown political leanings in England and he soon took up politics in his new home, the colony of NSW, Australia. He went on to become well-known due ...
Sabine Baring-Gould was a scholarly English poet, priest and hagiographer whose considerable body of work includes the famous hymn Onward Christian Soldiers. This is the piece that he is most famous for but his output over a long lifetime ran to some 1240 different publications. He was a translator of ancient ecclesiastical scripts and is credited with a famous carol called ...
Saint Yared was a 6th century poet and musician who is generally regarded as being the greatest ever of his ilk to come out of Ethiopia. He holds the honour of being the inventor of the sacred music tradition that is still practiced today within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He also devised his country’s system of musical notation. The Ethiopian chant known ...
Septimus Winner was a 19th century American poet and songwriter. He was an occasional performer and teacher of music and he also worked in the music publishing business. As well as his own name he used a number of pseudonyms for his work, including Apsley Street, Alice Hawthorne and Paul Stenton. He must have used the name Hawthorne because of his mother being ...
The Hebrew medieval poet known as Samuel ha-Nagid was an extremely influential man who lived in the part of southern Spain, which is now known as Andalusia, that was occupied by the Moors in the 11th century. Apart from being a well-known writer he was a philologist, politician and soldier who acted as patron to other poets and artists. History records him ...
The English poet Sarah Fyge Egerton was one of few female poets around at the time and, as evidenced from her output of writing, she was an outspoken young woman. She touched on controversial subjects such as religion and politics along with the relationships between married couples and the development of friendships. As a teenager she took exception to a misogynist piece of ...
Taneda Santoka was a Japanese haiku poet who specialised in free verse haiku during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also translated works in French and Russian into Japanese. His birth name was Taneda Shoichi and he was born on the 3rd December 1882 in a small village on the southwestern tip of Honshu which is Japan’s main island. He had a ...
The story of this medieval poet and singer born in India during the 15th century is, understandably, shrouded in mystery and some say that his life spanned over 100 years. He composed songs in a relatively crude Hindi dialect called Braj Bhasha and historians claim that he was responsible for ensuring that this version of the Indian language passed into literary ...
