In 8th Century China, Wang Wei was one of the most renowned poets and artists of the age and around 400 of his works survive to this day. He was born into aristocracy in 699 in Jinzhong and spent much of his life as a government official, as well as rising to the high status of a poet. Wang Wei was a ...
Born around 522BC, Pindar was one of the great lyric poets of Greece, and is also seen as one of the more challenging. His poetry is often difficult to read and many readers, including literary scholars, over the years have struggled with the quirks and idiosyncrasies his verse contains. Pindar was brought up in a village not far from Thebes and rumor had ...
Romantic poet Robert Southey was born in Bristol in 1774 and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of his time. Now often overlooked in the literary wake of such giants as Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was the poet laureate for over thirty years and had a profound effect on the literary landscape. He was brought up from the ...
Jack Spicer had a curious name for the short poems that he wrote in the early part of his writing career. He called them “one night stands” and this was actually part of the title of one of his published collections (One Night Stands and Other Poems, pub 1980). He was at his peak in the 1950s when he and a few ...
Famous for his epic works and love poems, Ovid was born in Rome in 43BC and is often viewed alongside some of the classical greats such as Horace and Virgil. Popular amongst his contemporaries, much academic effort has been expended on the mystery of his exile by the emperor Augustus. His most well-known work is a 15 book epic charting the ...
Perhaps best known for her novel Little Women, Louisa May Alcott was also an accomplished poet who was born in Pennsylvania in 1832. Contemporary to the likes of Thoreau and Emerson, she was brought up in an intellectual and transcendental environment that fueled her future search for perfection. As a child she was considered wild and a bit of a ...
Henry Vaughan was hailed by Samuel Johnson as one of the metaphysical poets, who were a group of seventeenth century British poets whose works were described as witty, elaborate and original and which questioned the meaning of spirituality and religion. Henry Vaughan and his twin brother Thomas were born on April 17th 1621 (by Vaughan’s own reckoning), in Brecknockshire (now Breconshire), south ...
When looking for a true giant amongst the writers of the 19th and 20th centuries it would be hard to find anyone more deserving of that title than George Bernard Shaw. His primary writing output was in the form of plays and he wrote more than sixty of those. He wrote a few novels, though these were much less successful, and he ...
Born in New York in 1913, Delmore Schwartz was a poet who was often seen as victim of his own love of logic and suffered from mental health problems throughout a large part of his later life that saw him admitted to sanatoriums. He was from Jewish American decent and his parents divorced when he was young, which influenced much of ...
Born in Peru in 1892, Cesar Vallejo was a poet and journalist who was from a small village in the Andes and is noted for his wide range of works including plays and novels. During his lifetime he only ever published 3 original works of poetry but they have each in their turn been considered as masterpieces of the art. Vallejo was ...
