Poetry blog

We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.

Recent posts

Richard Crashaw Poems

 

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, ...

Pedro Salinas Poems

 

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 ...

Anna Laetitia Barbauld Poems

 

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 Poems

 

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 Poems

 

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 Poems

 

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 Poems

 

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 ...

Lew Welch Poems

 

Lew Welch was an American poet who led a short and sometimes troubled life spanning the middle decades of the 20th century. He was inspired to write when at college through studying the work of Gertrude Stein, and she was the subject of his senior thesis when graduating in 1950. His time at college was spent with fellow “Beat Generation” poets ...

Mao Zedong Poems

 

Mao Zedong was one of the most influential and significant individuals in the whole history of China. He was founder of the People’s Republic of China and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 until his death 27 years later. His political ideologies were founded on Marxist and Leninist theories. His strategy of government and military rule was known as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. ...

Julia Ward Howe Poems

 

Julia Ward Howe lived most of her life battling constantly to change women’s lives for the better. The United States, just like other parts of the world, was a place where women were allowed little freedom of expression and had precious little control over their own lives.  A glaring example of this was her own marriage when she found that her husband, ...