Recent posts

Karl Shapiro Poems

 

Born in Maryland in 1913, Karl Shapiro was one of the youngest recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and was famous for denigrating his university in Virginia as a place where both blacks and Jews were treated with disdain. Shapiro’s early work was stoutly traditionalist but he quickly fell out of love with it, believing that it eventually stifled the creativity of ...

Lorine Niedecker Poems

 

Born in Wisconsin in 1903, Lorine Niedecker was a poet influenced by the early work of the surrealists and imagists who became part of a loosely connected group of artists who were known as objectivists. Niedecker spent a large part of her life in the same rural setting, close to Lake Koshkronong, working in many jobs including a librarian and a ...

Aeschylus Poems

 

Aeschylus was the first exponent of the dramatic form now known as “The Greek Tragedy”. It has been said that the idea of writing tragedies came to him in a dream when ordered to do so by Dionysus, the God of the Grape Harvest. This occurred during an episode where the young Aeschylus was sent out from the city to watch grapes ...

Sterling A Brown Poems

 

Poet, critic and writer, Sterling A Brown was born in Washington in 1901 and was one of the foremost voices of African-American literature in the 20th Century as well as one of its greatest teachers. His father had been a slave and worked his way to become a minister and professor at Howard University which has played a major role ...

Stephane Mallarme Poems

 

French poet and follower of the symbolist movement, Stephane Mallarme was born in Paris in 1842. A huge inspiration for the many writers and poets that followed, he was one of the major innovating forces in art in the mid to late 19th Century, although he spent much of his life in poverty. Born into a comfortable, middle class family, he was ...

Oliver Goldsmith Poems

 

Born around 1728 in County Longford in Ireland, Oliver Goldsmith was a poet and novelist who is perhaps best known for his poem The Deserted Village that rails against the collection of wealth for wealth’s sake and the move of people away from rural areas into the cities. Goldsmith went to study in Dublin at Trinity College when he was just 16 ...

Nichita Stanescu Poems

 

Born in 1933, Romanian poet and essay writer Nichita Stanescu grew up under the influence of World War II and the subsequent rise of communism across the Easter Block. Probably more famous in his own country than the rest of the world, never the less Stanescu remains one of the more important figures of literature in the 20th Century. Stanescu spent most ...

Edward FitzGerald Poems

 

Born in 1809 in Bredfield, England, Edward FitzGerald was a poet and writer and is perhaps most famous for his translation of the Persian work The Rubáiyát of Khayyám. He was raised in a wealthy family and spent part of his youth in Paris before attending school in Bury St Edmunds and then going onto Cambridge University in 1826. FitzGerald made friends ...

Primo Levi Poems

 

Born in 1919, Primo Levi was a writer and poet, a Jew born in Italy who survived the holocaust of World War II. Imprisoned in Auschwitz, perhaps his most well-known work was If This is a Man which was an account of his time there. He was brought up and schooled in Turin where his father worked in the manufacturing business. Levi ...

Nelly Sachs Poems

 

A Jewish poet and writer in the dark days of Nazi rule, Nelly Sachs was born in Berlin in 1891. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer and was very protective of her. Sachs suffered ill health in her childhood that meant she was tutored at home for much of the time. Her early life as a shy woman who lived a sheltered ...