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 ...
Georgia Douglas Johnson, poet, playwright and newspaper columnist, was born of a mixed race heritage in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on September 10th 1880. Her schooling gave her a good grounding in literature and music. She learned to play the violin and this would be the basis of her later use of music in her plays. She was a teacher for a while ...
American novelist, short story writer and poet Herman Melville is probably best known for his novel Moby Dick, the most famous of his accounts of life at sea. The majority of his writing was done in his younger years and his work was largely forgotten until long after his death. Melville was born in New York City, August 1st 1819, the third child ...
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche will forever be known as one of the greatest ever philosophers but he was more than that. During his lifetime, which spanned the second half of the 19th century, he also wrote poetry and composed music. In direct contrast to his family background and upbringing he was an outspoken critic of popular religious concepts, believing more in life as ...
One of the giants of French literature, François-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, was born in Paris in 1694 and was perhaps one of the most versatile poets, wits and writers of his time. Fond of criticizing the establishment around him, he was known for his forward thinking views on the rights of the individual to express their views, ...
Born in Moldavia in 1896, but spending a large part of his life in France, Tristan Tzara was a poet and performance artist who had a role in many of the great movements of the early 20th Century including symbolism, cubism and the avant-garde. Raised in a Romanian Jewish family, Tzara went to school in Bucharest and by the age of ...
Etheridge Knight was an American poet who had a tough start to life and it didn’t get a lot better as he got older. He was one of seven children born into a poor family and his education was just about the bare minimum required in America. He followed a path that almost inevitably led him into drug dependency and prison by ...
Anaïs Nin was an unconventional poet. Her work did not come in the form of verse or rhyming couplets. She was, in fact, best known for her diaries and journals, many of which were not published in full until after her death. She led what most would describe as a “Bohemian” life style including being married to two men at the same ...
Anne Spencer was an influential, African-American poet whose long life spanned the end of the 19th and much of the 20th century. Along with compatriots like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, Anne wrote about the struggles of black people to establish themselves in America. She was one of the driving forces behind the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movements of ...
