Born in Egypt in 1888, Giuseppe Ungaretti was one of the most influential Italian poets of the last century helping to develop the writing style that was known as Hermeticism, which grew out of the Symbolist school of thought. His first work of published poetry was produced whilst he was on the front line of World War I, fighting in the ...
Born in 1849 in New York, Emma Lazarus is perhaps best known for providing the poem adorning the plaque at the bottom of the Empire State Building, entitled The New Colossus. From a wealthy Jewish background, she was a precocious child who was largely tutored at home. Taking an interest in literature and poetry from early on, she also learned several ...
The poet who became known as Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese exponent of the Haiku form of short poetry. He learned this form at school in Tokyo under master teachers Sogan and Chikua. The basic element of this form of poetry is that the writer is able to cleverly capture a specific image or feeling using sensory language. This might be inspired ...
Katherine Philips was one of the few female writers to emerge during the 17th century and, in her short lifetime, was responsible for a large number of poems which seem to have been written for the pleasure of her friends rather than for publication. She founded The Society of Friendship which had mainly female members. She was a multi-linguist and translated foreign ...
Irish poet Francis Ledwidge was just 29 years old when he was killed on the battlefields of World War I. He was born in Slane in 1887, one of nine children in a family that lived on the edge of poverty though he was lucky to have the ethos of education drilled into him from an early age. His father died ...
Born in 1865 in New South Wales, Dame Mary Gilmore was a socialist first and then a poet, and is one of the few Australians to have featured on their monetary system. The oldest born to a Scottish farmer and an Australian mother with roots in Ireland, she attended public school before the family moved to Downside. At school there, ...
Lucy Maud Montgomery was a Canadian writer who lived for her writing in spite of a traumatic childhood and a series of misfortunes in her personal relationships. Her writing output was substantial yet she only produced one book of poetry. Her series of “Anne” novels beginning with her most famous title Anne of Green Gables (published in 1908) turned into a life ...
Born in 1886 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Delmira Agustini is one of the most celebrated Latin American poets of the last century, known for her precocious talent and tragically short life. Her work was strictly modernist but she helped to redefine the tradition with her intensely erotic verse that looked at the world from a woman’s viewpoint. Agustini began to write poetry at ...
Born in 1913 in Taranaki Province, New Zealand, Douglas Stewart was an Australian poet who was more known for his editing career and his promotion of burgeoning writers in the 20th Century. He was born into a well-to-do middle class family and led a fairly happy childhood in New Zealand. Stewart claims he decided to become a writer at the age of ...
John Crowe Ransom was one of a group of sixteen, southern-based American poets who famously created the “Fugitives” group. They were all passionately committed to the southern ideal of agrarianism as opposed to northern industrialisation which, they felt, was disadvantaging the south unfairly. The group were, no doubt, politically motivated but they did their lobbying with their pens. All were accomplished writers ...
