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Often lost in the shadow of some his more famous compatriots, George Peele was a poet and competent dramatist who was born in Sussex in 1556. His father was reasonably affluent and worked at a local hospital as a clerk, writing two largely forgotten works on book keeping but able to provide a good education for his son. Peele initially attended the ...
Born in New York, in 1910, Hilda Conkling was a remarkable writer because all of her published work was produced at a very early age, between 4 and 14 years, and she had stopped composing verses by the time she reached adulthood. The primary driving force for this early development was undoubtedly her mother, Grace Hazard Conkling, who was herself a ...
The poet, novelist and playwright Franz Werfel was born in the Czech capital of Prague at the end of the 19th century although, of course, at that time, the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although Jewish by birth he also had strong leanings towards the Catholic faith which, not surprisingly, made him unpopular with Jewish friends and readers of his ...
Fulke Greville was an aristocrat who lived during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I, serving both with distinction in a number of posts including Secretary of State to Wales. He was a thoughtful and often gravely serious poet and also a writer of sonnets and closet dramas. His most famous work is probably the biography of his close friend ...
Genevieve Taggard was an American poet who, even though her life was cut short in her fifties, was responsible for thirteen books of poetry. She also wrote a biography of the poet Emily Dickinson and edited four books, including Circumference: Varieties of Metaphysical Verse, 1459-1928. Throughout her life she was deeply conscious of social injustices, especially for those seriously affected by ...
Felicia Hemans was a 19th century poet of both English and Irish descent although she also considered herself half Welsh later in life. She was a prolific poet who received criticism and praise in almost equal measures. Female poets in the early 19th century were rare and not, generally, well regarded. Felicia Hemans though attracted the attention and admiration of poets such ...
There are conflicting versions of what kind of poet George Bacovia actually was. Initially he was firmly in the Romanian Symbolist camp, progressing later into the realms of Modernism where he received much critical acclaim. Between the two world wars though some saw him as a Neo-Symbolist while others almost dismissed him as a poet lacking in significant ideas. Into the 1950s, ...
Born in 1876 in Gloucestershire, Eva Dobell was a poet and editor who is perhaps best known for her war time poems such as Pluck and Night Duty which were written whilst working as a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment during World War I. She was brought up in a reasonably affluent family with a father who was a respected ...
Born in Pennsylvania in 1896, Esther Popel was an African American poet, writer and activist who was popular for works such as Thoughtless Thinks by a Thinkless Thoughter. Her father was a mailman and encouraged all his children to gain a better education and Popel herself graduated at the age of 18 from the Harrisburg’s Central High School. Popel made history when ...
Born in Wolverhampton in 1875, Evelyn Underhill was a writer and poet who was greatly influenced by the spiritual world and was perhaps best known for her works on the mysticism, particularly that which surrounds Christianity. An only child with a father who was a writer, Underhill spent most of her early days being educated at home before going to a ...
