Greek poet Theognis lived around the sixth century BC and is generally thought of in the same vein as Homer and Hesiod as one of the earliest writers to whom we can ascribe specific works. Indeed, Theognis can be considered one of the first lyric writers who were actually concerned how their works would last in the years to come. As with ...
Born in 1805 in Old Harlow, a well to do part of Essex, poet and writer Sarah Flower Adams was perhaps best known for her epic dramatic poem Vivia Perpetua which was written shortly before her untimely death from tuberculosis and the hymn Nearer, My God, To Thee. She was born into a talented family. Her sister went on to become ...
Born on the shoreline of Maine in 1849, Sarah Orne Jewett was a poet and novel writer who produced a large number of popular works that reflected the local color of the area. Her family had lived in the region for a since the Founding Fathers and were well known. Her father was a respected community doctor whom she regularly ...
Born in 1916 in North Dakota, poet and novelist Thomas McGrath is probably best known for his work long poem Letters to an Imaginary Friend as well as a host of novels and children’s books that set him apart as one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century. His parents were originally from Ireland but were drawn to the ...
Yvor Winters was a 20th century American poet who favoured an experimental style of writing which did not always endear him to his peers. Some pieces consisted of one line and he varied his work from the more formal style to including imagist sections. While teaching at Stanford University he fell out with the Head of the English Department, a man who ...
William Henry Drummond was an Irish-Canadian poet of the second half of the 19th century who lived a relatively short life and yet made a huge impact on the Canadian poetry loving public. He specialised in humorous dialect poems that were instantly appealing and he became "one of the most widely-read and loved poets" in Canada." Alongside this he was a qualified ...
William Dean Howells was an American poet and novelist who wrote in a strictly Realist style. He also contributed to numerous publications with literary reviews of other writers while occasionally writing plays. In later life he made the statement that, in his opinion, “the future of American writing was not in poetry but in novels”. He also believed that the romantic storytelling seen ...
William Matthews has been described as “an alert and engaging” 20th century American poet and essayist. He had an unorthodox style though in that you could almost describe many of his poems as “essays in verse” where he seems to make no effort to include any standard poetic rhythm into the lines, or use rhyming couplets and the like. One of his ...
Sir William Watson was an English poet, most certainly at his peak in the latter years of the 19th century. He could be described as the archetypal “Victorian Poet” with his style and idioms being firmly entrenched in that period. Some of his poems were of a lyrical nature, none more so than the famous Wordsworth’s Grave, written in 1890. At other ...
Born in the Hamlet of Husum, Jutland, in 1817, German poet Theodor Storm was a proponent of literary realism, writing a number of novellas, poems and short stories the most famous of which is The Rider on the White Horse. His father was a lawyer and the young Storm went to school in Husum before following in his footsteps and heading ...
