Poetry blog

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

Recent posts

Nahum Tate Poems

 

Born in Dublin in 1652, Nahum Tate was brought up in a puritan household and grew to be one of the most popular writers of his time. Perhaps most famous for his adaptation of King Lear and other Shakespeare plays, Tate was also a talented poem and hymn writer who lived for most of his life in London. After his father informed ...

Ramon Lopez Velarde Poems

 

Born in Jerez in Mexico in 1888, Ramon Lopez Velarde was one of the great postmodern literary influences on poetry, despite a life cut short by pneumonia. An enigmatic and controversial figure, he is considered by many to be the country’s national poet. Velarde was brought up in an affluent family, his father having forged a career as a lawyer ...

Robert Crawford Poems

 

Robert Crawford was born in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, in 1868 and is known for a small collection of poetry that was largely self-published in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not much is known about his life though he was reasonably well educated and attended King’s School in the area of Parramatta and then went on to university in Sydney. After leaving there he tried his hand at ...

Mark Akenside Poems

 

Mark Akenside was an 18th century English poet whose path in life was unclear during his early years. His parents would have him study as a dissenting minister but his ambitions lay either in the fields of medicine or politics. He eventually became a doctor/physician while producing often thought provoking poetry which ruffled a few feathers in the establishment. His best known piece ...

Richard Le Gallienne Poems

 

Richard Le Gallienne has been described by some critics as a relatively obscure English poet with an “excess of romantic sensibility in an age of irony”. Born in the late 19th century, he was one of the so-called “fin-de-siècle esthetes of the 1890s” and counted among his literary associates the likes of Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats and he ...

Margaret Widdemer Poems

 

Margaret Widdemer was an American poet and novelist whose long life spanned the last sixteen years of the 19th century and more than three quarters of the 20th. She was primarily a poet who wrote with a strict regard for more traditional verse construction. Her work, covering diverse subjects, won her a number of awards. Her most notable achievement was the award ...

Lucy Terry Prince Poems

 

It is generally believed that Lucy Terry Prince was the first black poet in America to have work published. Unfortunately only one of her poems has survived. Bars Fight is a true story about the killing of two white families by Native Americans. As an infant she was plucked from her home somewhere in West Africa and then transported across the ocean. ...

Laura Elizabeth Richards Poems

 

Laura Elizabeth Richards was a prolific American writer who was responsible for some ninety books during her lifetime. She is best known for her children’s stories and poetry with, possibly, her most famous piece of work being a short piece of poetic nonsense called Eletelephony. She lived a long life and was highly regarded in both 19th and 20th century literary circles ...

Mary Mapes Dodge Poems

 

Born in 1831 in New York City, Mary Mapes Dodge was a children’s writer and occasional poet who is probably more well-known for her fictional work Hans Brinker than her small collection of verses. She was brought up in an educated family, her father a professor, chemist and inventor, and she was given a solid early education through private tutors ...

Karle Wilson Baker Poems

 

Born in Arkansas in 1878, Karle Wilson Baker was a poet and writer who was most known for her poetry collections The Burning Bush and Old Coins and her novel Family Styles. Although she was brought up in Arkansas, she moved with her parents to Texas and fell in love with the state’s history and people, writing extensively about its ...