We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Thomas Bracken was an Irish born poet, journalist and politician who spent much of his life in New Zealand following his migration as a boy to Australia. He was passionate about the interests of the Maori people, the indigenous population of the islands, and is famous for writing God Defend New Zealand. His words were set to music and then adopted as the ...
Thomas Edward Brown was a Manx poet of some distinction from the late Victorian era. More commonly known as T E Brown, he was born on the Isle of Man which lies off the north western shore of England. He strived for all of his life to bring to literary attention the old Anglo-Manx dialect. There are strains of Gaelic in this ...
Born in Kent in 1568, Sir Henry Wotton was a diplomat and writer who is perhaps best known for his work The Character of a Happy Life. He was born into a well-to-do family that included other diplomats and landed gentry and received a good education, first at Winchester College and then Oxford University, from which he graduated in 1588 ...
Over her short life, New Zealander Robin Hyde rose to become one of the country’s most famous poets. Born in South Africa in 1906 to Australian and English parents, she moved to Wellington in her first year and remained there for most of the rest of her life. Her initial education was at the Girls’ College in Wellington before she studied ...
Sa’di was the pen name for the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi who is considered one of the major regional writers from the 13th Century and is notable that number of his works have been popularized in the West. Sa’di was born into a relatively poor family and his time living in Shiraz in Iran was difficult, made more so by the ...
One of the lesser known poets of the 16th century, Richard Barnfield was born in 1574 in Staffordshire and has been mostly of interest to literary academics because of his curious relationship with William Shakespeare. Born into a reasonably affluent family for the time, Barnfield is thought by some to be a prime contender for the identity of the rival ...
German poet Peter Huchel was born on the outskirts of Berlin in 1903 and lived through the turbulent times of two world wars and the subsequent splintering of his home city into east and west. He remains one of the most outspoken writers of the communist era and spent almost half his life behind the Iron Curtain fighting against the censorship ...
Rose Terry Cooke was a 19th century American writer who turned her hand to poetry, children’s stories and a genre of short story writing that fits neatly amongst the so-called “local colour” literature that became popular in the United States after the Civil War. Her tales were descriptive and light hearted, giving those living in other parts of America a taste of ...
Robert Seymour Bridges holds a unique place in British literary history in that he was the only physician to be appointed to the post of Poet Laureate. His medical career had long finished though when we was appointed in 1913 and he remained in this post until his death in 1930. His fame as a poet came late in his lifetime and ...
Paul Hamilton Hayne was a nineteenth-century American poet who was, perhaps, even better known for editing work done by other southern states poets such as Henry Timrod and Allen Tate. He supported Timrod both financially and professionally, especially when his friend was seriously ill with tuberculosis. Hayne showed his philanthropic nature by ensuring that Timrod’s work was published. When civil war gripped America ...
