Known as much for his mysterious disappearance as his artistic endeavors, Weldon Kees was born in Nebraska in 1941. He was a talented painter, poet and jazz musician who influenced many later American writers and is considered one of the major literary influences of the 20th Century. From humble beginnings – his father was a hardware manufacturer and his mother a teacher ...
Poet and royalist Thomas Carew was born in 1595 in London, brought up in privileged surroundings because his father was master in chancery and his mother the daughter of the Mayor. He was most famous for being the poetic “arbiter elegantiae” at the court of the doomed king, Charles I. He is also noted for his intensely erotic poem A Rapture ...
Born around 1561, Robert Southwell was a Catholic priest who wrote poetry and was one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales who were arrested, tortured and put to death by the state. Brought up amidst the Norfolk gentry of the time, Southwell enjoyed a privileged beginning to life, despite his family having Catholic sympathies. In 1576, Southwell went to Northern ...
Strongly linked with the Metaphysical Poets, Richard Crashaw was born around 1612 in London and brought up in a broadly anti-Catholic family. He was a man of great piety and prone to long periods of prayer who was known for his serious approach to religion which finally led him away from the Anglicism of his youth to embrace Catholic doctrine. From 1631, ...
Born in Madrid in 1891, Pedro Salinas was a poet who was well-known for being part of the Generation of ’27, an influential group of poets in the 1920s that included Rafael Alberti and Emilio Prados. Brought up in the hustle and bustle of the city, his father died when he was just 8 years old. Salinas attended at Colegio Hispano-Francés before ...
At a time in history when female published writers were very rare, Anna Laetitia Barbauld stood out with her English Romantic style of writing poetry. She also produced a number of essays, including works on political subjects, and was a noted children's author. She was certainly outspoken, even into her late sixties, and she fell foul of literary society when she published a ...
Arthur Symons was a British poet whose output was cut short due to a severe mental breakdown in his 40s. Additionally he was a literary critic and, for a short time, he edited the influential, but short lived, Savoy magazine. Between 1895 and 1896 he collaborated with Aubrey Beardsley and Leonard Smithers on this art and literature publication which had such a ...
Alan Dugan was an American poet who published seven volumes of poetry over a forty year period from 1961-2001 and picked up countless honours and awards along the way. His poetry style was generally considered to be the down to earth, plain speaking type and one reviewer compared the language he used as being like that of “your typical bartender”. No flowery ...
David Ignatow was an American poet who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. While many other writers have used travel to broaden their minds and experiences, Ignatow saw all the life he needed to see in New York City and stayed close to home, writing in a direct, down to earth style that appealed to his readers. There was no ...
B.H. Fairchild is a multi-award winning American poet who has made a career out of fusing his experiences growing up amongst “blue collar,” mid-Western industrial landscapes with so-called “high art”. A Los Angeles Times review of his 2009 collection of poetry, which he called Usher: Poems, described Fairchild’s writing as: “….gritty meets exalted and gets the shadows just right.” This curious amalgam ...
