We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Born in 1900, English poet and writer Basil Bunting was brought up with Quaker roots in Northumberland and he was schooled in Yorkshire and the Berkshire. When war broke out and he was called up in 1918, Bunting refused and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector and sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Bunting wrote his poetry with a specific emphasis on the quality ...
Known for his love songs and poetry, Vidyapati was born 1352 in Bisfi, India. His name comes from Sanskrit and denotes a man of learning or knowledge and his poetry was a great influence on many writers over the following centuries. Often written in the Maithili dialect, the 100s of poems collected together in the Padavalli often explore the love between Krishna ...
Despite living a significant part of his life without a home, W H Davies was one of the most popular poets of his time. Born in Newport, Wales, in 1871, the son of an iron worker, Davies lost his father when he was three years old and subsequently went to live with his grandparents. He was a troublesome child, attending ...
Born in County Donegal in 1824, Irishman William Allingham was a poet and scholar who was best known for his Diary that was published after his death. He wrote a large number of verses and his poem The Faeries has been included in many anthologies over the years. His father was a bank manager, English by birth, and Allingham was brought up ...
Famous for writing poems in his native Dorset dialect, writer and poet William Barnes was born into a farming family in Bagber in 1801. He grew up speaking in the dialect of the day and saw his upbringing as idyllic, something which came across in his later pastoral poetry that celebrated the simple folk of the county. Barnes left school at 13 ...
Richard Aldington was an English poet, novelist and biographer and is one of the 16 First World War poets whose name appears on a stone in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. In addition to a volume of war poetry he published a novel in 1929 about the war called Death of a Hero. His popularity took a serious hit with a biography of ...
Activist, journalist and poet Subramania Bharati was born in Ettayapuram, India, in 1882. Brought up in the Tamil religion, he was one of their literary leading lights and his verses were characterized by their potent nationalism and patriotic fervour. Educated at the local Hindu college he was a precocious student who turned to poetry when he was just eleven years old. By ...
Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet of the 16th century who enjoyed the privileged position throughout most of his adult life of being a favoured poet of the Kings of France. He was generally accepted as the leading writer amongst a group of Renaissance poets called La Pléiade, a collection of talented poets of the time that included Joachim du ...
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American writer who packed a great deal into his relatively short lifetime which spanned the first half of the 20th century. Remarkably he had his first collection of poems published when aged only 17 and his final, epic piece of work (Western Star), won him the Pulitzer Prize even though it was unfinished when he died in ...
Born in Bristol in 1752, Thomas Chatterton was one of the most enigmatic characters of 18th Century poetry, mostly in part because he took his own life at the tender age of just 17 and wrote the fake 'Rowley poems' that caused such controversy at the time. He became a the focal point for many later poets from the Gothic era ...
