We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
The Italian writer Cesare Pavese lived a relatively short life spanning the first half of the 20th century. He was a poet and literary critic and was responsible for translating a great deal of English and American literature into Italian – many of these translations were seen in Italian for the first time. He was well regarded as one of the leading ...
Born in Vaucluse in 1907, René Char was a member of the French surrealist movement and was one the enduring poets of the 20th Century. The fourth born and youngest in a well to do family, his father was the mayor of the district and an influential business man. Most of Char’s early life was spent in the palatial grounds of ...
Charles Lamb was an English literary figure from the late 18th and early 19th century who was described by his biographer, E V Lucas, as “the most lovable figure in English literature”. He was a contemporary of famous English writers Samuel T Coleridge and William Wordsworth and Lamb collaborated with both at different times on the publication of his poems and ...
Allen Tate was a member of the so-called Southern Agrarians, a group of twelve American poets, social commentators and writers who shared a common belief in the promotion of southern attitudes in literature, politics and agrarianism. Throughout the depression years in the 1920s and 1930s they were responsible for reviving long lost southern literature and writing new chapters in the story. He ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
