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Albery Allson Whitman Poems

 

Albery Allson Whitman was a 19th century African American poet who, despite being born into slavery, carved out a career for himself as a poet and orator. He served as a pastor throughout the south and mid-western regions of the United States. His poetry was universally well received and he became known as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race". He is included ...

Adelbert von Chamisso Poems

 

Adelbert von Chamisso is recorded as a German poet and botanical expert who was actually born at the end of the 18th century in France. His aristocratic family were driven out of their French chateau at the time of the Revolution. The poem that his is best known for was written in prose narrative form and called Peter Schlemihl. This was a story ...

Vincent Starrett Poems

 

Vincent Starrett was a writer and journalist who was born in Toronto in 1886 and was perhaps more famous for his detective fiction, a talent he often attributed to living the first part of his life above a bookshop owned by his grandfather. When Starrett was young, the family moved from Canada to the US where they settled in Chicago, a ...

Aurelian Townshend Poems

 

Born around 1583 in the town of Dereham Abbey in the heart of Norfolk, Aurelian Townshend was noted for his plays and poetry and was a later influence on 20th Century writers such as T S Eliot. Not much is known for certain of his early life, including his exact date of birth, but Townshend was thought to be one ...

Albert Verwey Poems

 

Albert Verwey was a notable Dutch poet and literary historian who became associated with the great literature movement throughout the Low Countries at the end of the 19th century known as the “Movement of Eighty”, named after the decade in which it happened (i.e.1880). He went on to establish himself as a major figure in the literary life of his country ...

Albert Samain Poems

 

Albert Samain was a 19th century French writer who belonged to the “symbolist” school of writers and artists. This movement had its origins in France, Belgium and Russia and its exponents wrote from the perspective of telling the absolute truth in their poetry without making it too obvious that they were doing so. Samain wrote in a typically descriptive style that explored ...

Alec de Candole Poems

 

Born in 1897 in Cheltheham, Alec de Candole is perhaps one of the lesser known war poets who produced work during the 1914-18 conflict known as The Great War. De Candole was barely out of his teens when he joined the army in 1917 and was only 21 when he met his death at Bonningues in France the following year. His ...

Aleksandër Stavre Drenova Poems

 

Albanian poet Aleksandër Stavre Drenova was born in 1872 in the small village of Drenovë and was most noted for his verse collections such as Sun Rays and Psalms of a Monk. He wrote under the pen name of Asdreni and spent much of his early life with his father who died when he Drenova was just thirteen. From then on, ...

Alexander Blok Poems

 

Born in 1880 in St Petersburg, Alexander Blok was an influential lyric poet and one of the leading lights of the Russian Symbolist Movement. His father taught law at Warsaw University and from very early on the young Blok was surrounded by literary types and an intellectual family environment that influenced him greatly. When his parents divorced, he went to live with ...

Yanka Kupala Poems

 

Yanka Kupala, sometimes written as Janka Kupala, was the pen name used by a Belarussian poet born in the late 19th century. He grew up to be regarded among the greatest of writers using the Belarussian language and was a great supporter of the partisan fighters fighting in his country against the Nazis during the second world war. Some of his early writing ...