We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Born in 1736 in Ruthven, Scotland, James Macpherson is mostly well-known for his translation of the epic Ossian poems of his native land but was also an accomplished poet in his own right and a leading political figure of the time. Born into a reasonably wealthy family, Macpherson traveled to Aberdeen in his teens where he studied at King’s College with ...
Whilst Chaucer may be the most remembered writer of this era, John Gower was also a noted poet and is known for three epic poems that were both moral and political comments on the times. Born in Kent around 1330, nothing much is known about Gower’s early life although it is thought that he was from a well-to-do Yorkshire family who ...
American John Hall Wheelock was born in Far Rockway, New York, in 1886 to an affluent family, his ancestor having built Dartmouth College. He was a poet influenced by the works of Swinburne and Robinson, and wrote on the time honored themes of romance, society and nature. Wheelock often described his poetry as works that were primarily about feeling and ...
It’s difficult to describe Janis Joplin as just a poet because she was a lot more than that. She was a powerful and unconventional stage performer with a gravelly, unique singing voice that got her millions of album sales worldwide during the 1960s. She grew up as a devotee of the so-called “beat poets” and, in fact, she led the beatnik lifestyle ...
Josh Malihabadi was a great champion of the Urdu language and it was a perceived threat to his mother tongue that prompted his migration from India to Pakistan in 1958. The prime minister of India at that time, Jawaharlal Nehru, tried to insist that he stayed but Malihabadi would have none of it. The Hindu majority in India spoke Hindi and Urdu ...
John Godfrey Saxe was a mostly satirical 19th century American poet and would-be politician. He tried twice to be elected to the position of Governor of his home state of Vermont, but failed twice. It was thought that his stance on slavery – he advocated a controversial policy of non-interference – almost certainly led to his downfall on both occasions. Most people ...
John Gay lived a relatively short life from the end of the 17th century to only the third decade of the 18th century but managed to write enough controversial verse to last a much longer lifetime. He was, on the one hand, patronised by the great and the good, thus allowing him to continue his musings. On the other hand he was ...
John Quincy Adams was an American poet who, by his own admission, would like to have been a better one, as evidenced by the following statement: "Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet." It is very likely though that his poetry only received the attention that it did because of who this great man ...
Born in 1870 in British Burma, Hector Hugh Munro was famous during the Edwardian era for his short stories and novels written under the pen name of Saki. Munro’s father worked for the police and the young writer may well have spent his formative years in Burma if his mother had not had an accident that saw him returned to ...
Born in 1796 near Bristol, Harley Coleridge is probably best known through association with his more famous father Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Brought up in an artistic and literary family, at the age of 4, Coleridge’s family moved from the small village of Clevedon to the Lake District to a property just a ...
