Poetry blog

We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.

Recent posts

Anne Glenny Wilson Poems

 

The Australian-born poet, short story writer and artist Anne Glenny Wilson, sometimes called Annie, spent most of her life living in New Zealand. She was well known for her sympathetic portrayals of home values and the Maori way of life and proved to be a popular female writer. She was born Anne Adams on the 11th June 1848 in ...

Alfred George Stephens Poems

 

Alfred George Stephens, often known simply as A G Stephens, was an Australian poet and literary critic who made regular contributions to the Sydney-based magazine The Bulletin. He set out to bolster and encourage the concept of Australian literature in its own right, even though many writers had strong European influences. He was born on the 28th August 1865 in the Queensland township ...

Alexander Craig Poems

 

Alexander Craig of Rosecraig was better known by his contemporaries as Scoto-Britane, which was his pen name. He was born in 1567, in Perthshire, in the north of Scotland, the year same year Mary Queen of Scots was executed after her long imprisonment in England by her cousin Elizabeth I. Born into an aristocratic family in post reformation Scotland, Alexander Craig lived ...

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet Poems

 

The 19th century Russian poet Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, a man born of noble blood, is considered to be among the best lyricists in Russian literature. A great friend of Leo Tolstoy, Fet was a deep thinking, often fatalistic poet who wrote a number of poems on the grim subject of death, although he framed these verses to make death sound like something ...

Adriano del Valle Poems

 

Adriano del Valle was a renowned Spanish poet and artist of the first half of the 20th century. For his 1933 work World Without Trams he was awarded the prestigious National Poetry prize. He was a contemporary of another famous Spanish poet – Federico Garcia Lorca – who he met in 1916. Two years later del Valle was the co-founder, along ...

Ahmad Shamlu Poems

 

The Persian poet, also known by the surname Shamloo, or in his homeland as Ahmad Šāmlū,  occasionally used the pen name A. Bamdad when writing poetry or working as a journalist. Many critics consider him to be amongst the most influential poets in modern-day Iran. While on first appearances his poetry suggests complexity, relying heavily on imagery, it is actually quite simple ...

August Strindberg Poems

 

August Strindberg was an extremely prolific writer of poetry, plays and books on a variety of subjects. Over a period of some forty years he wrote in excess of sixty plays and thirty books covering such topics as politics, history, Swedish culture, autobiographies and some fiction. He was also an accomplished artist. His style of writing has been described as iconoclastic and ...

Barry Cornwall Poems

 

Barry Cornwall was the pseudonym used by an English poet who also enjoyed a long career in the legal profession. Despite being a busy lawyer he still found the time to compose verse although it seems that he wrote his poetry over a relatively short period of time, approximately between the years 1815 and 1832. He was born Bryan Waller Procter on the ...

Adelaide Procter Poems

 

Adelaide Procter was known, by many in the literary world, as one of the most popular poets of Victorian times. Indeed, it is said that she was Queen Victoria’s favourite poet and many of her verses were set to music, often as hymns. She lived a short but full life, exhibiting philanthropic qualities throughout. She spent a lot of time with homeless and ...

Babette Deutsch Poems

 

Babette Deutsch was an American poet, literary critic and novelist. She was also a renowned translator of Russian literature into English, her most notable work being the translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin along with a number of poems written by Boris Pasternak. Her own poetry received critical attention for the first time in 1919 when she published a collection called Banners, the ...