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 ...
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 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 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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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, 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 ...
William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who was, for a time, an Anglican minister. His brief spell in the ministry dramatically affected his views on religion and he demonstrated this with a controversial series of articles in the Toronto Globe which attracted a great deal of negative reaction from the paper’s readers. ...
This 20th century American poet was known among his friends and contemporaries as Waring Cuney. He was musically trained and could have become a singer, but he chose to pursue a career in literature instead. His poetry is, in many ways, influenced by his musical training, with blues and ballad forms often appearing in his verse. His status as one of the ...
