We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
David Gascoyne was an English poet whose life spanned a good deal of the 20th century. He achieved the status of published poet at the remarkably young age of 16 with his collection called Roman Balcony and Other Poems. Incredibly, only one year later, he followed that up with a novel called Opening Day. He was one of the surrealist group of ...
English poet George Gascoigne was born around 1535 in Bedfordshire. He part of the Elizabethan court for a while, thought largely unsuccessful, and was a soldier who fought in the Low Countries of Belgium and France including the Middleburg Siege of 1572. He was a poet of some repute and his works helped in the deification of the Queen which saw ...
Charles of Orléans was born in Paris in 1394. A nobleman with several titles in addition to Duke of Orléans, he was also an accomplished poet and it is believed that he wrote hundreds of poems while incarcerated as a prisoner of war for some twenty five years. This long period of imprisonment was at the hands of the English who had ...
English poet George Barker was born in the Loughton, Essex, in 1913 and is considered one of the livelier characters of 20th century literature. T.S. Eliot said Barker was a genius and his life was often as turbulent and extravagant as his verse, fathering fifteen children over his life time by different partners. Although he is barely remembered in the ...
The French poet Benjamin Péret was one of the founders of the French Surrealist movement in art. He employed surrealist automatism in his writing, which probably sat well with his membership of the Parisian Dadaist movement which he joined after the end of the First World War. Dadaists were European avant-garde writers and artists who concentrated on experimental and innovative methods of ...
Garcilaso de la Vega was a 16th century Spanish poet and soldier whose love of the military life was to be his undoing. His life was cut short in his mid-thirties following wounds sustained at a battle in southern France in 1536. As well as being a renowned soldier of the Kings “Imperial Guard” he was also an innovative writer. He was ...
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet who has spent a good deal of her life teaching creative writing. In 1976 she developed and became director of the first known low-residency, Master of Fine Arts degree course in Creative Writing in the United States. Now in her 70s, Ellen has published six collections of poetry as well as a number of craft ...
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 ...
