Recent posts

Guillaume Apollinaire Poems

 

Born in Italy in 1880, Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet, writer and critic who settled in France and is known as one of the founding fathers of surrealism. Although his father was not known, his mother was from Polish royalty and he was brought up speaking French, Italian and Polish. As a teenager, he moved from Rome to Paris and soon ...

Francisco Balagtas Poems

 

Born in 1788 in Bulacan, Francisco Balagtas is rightly seen as one of the literary greats of the Philippines, a prolific romantic poet known for his epic Florante at Laura. Born into a life of poverty, from a young age he was hungry for knowledge and, after attending school in Bigaa, went to Manila where he became a servant to a ...

Joy Goswami Poems

 

Joy Goswami is one of the best BengaLi Poets around and writes in the Bengali language. He is a well published writer of the ‘post-Jibananda Das era’, having some 25 poetry collections behind him. In addition to this he has also written ten novels, one of them written completely in verse. He has also written a book of essays. He runs ...

George MacDonald Poems

 

Fantasy writer and poet George MacDonald was born Aberdeenshire in 1824 and was considered a strong influence on such literary greats as Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien. From strong farming stock, MacDonald grew up in a staunchly Calvinist atmosphere, and, although he disagreed with its doctrines, it is something that influenced his writings and convinced him to become a ...

Erin Belieu Poems

 

American poet Erin Belieu was born in 1967 in Nebraska and won an MA at Boston and an MFA at Ohio before going on to teach at various universities and colleges across the States, including as a professor for creative writing. Her works have covered such diverse issues as gender divides and meaning, the idea of love, and how our history ...

Paul Celan Poems

 

From Jewish Romanian descent, poet and writer Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Cernauti (now in what we call the Ukraine). He grew up to learn Hebrew and was brought up speaking German because of his mother’s love of German literature and was fond of writing poetry from a very early age, often in secret. In 1938, Paul Celan moved to ...

William Morris Poems

 

William Morris was a poet and writer who was also at the forefront of textile arts in the latter half of the nineteenth century in England. He was born in 1834 in Essex and was from a relatively well-off middle class family. His father was in finance and his mother was descended from a wealthy middle England family. Confined to the ...

Constantine Cavafy Poems

 

Constantine Cavafy was born on 29th April 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, the youngest of nine siblings, two of whom died in infancy.  His father, Petros Ioannes, who held dual Greek and British citizenship, was a wealthy businessman with import/export offices in Constantinople, London and Liverpool.  At the time of Petros’ death the family were living in Liverpool but moved back to Alexandria ...

Yehuda Amichai Poems

 

Yehuda Amichai was born 3rd May 1924 in Wurzburg, Germany to an Orthodox Jewish family.  When he was twelve the family emigrated to Palestine, then settled in Jerusalem in 1936. Amichai’s native language was German and he could speak fluent Hebrew by the time they arrived in Palestine.  He attended a religious High School in Jerusalem. During World War Two Amichai fought with ...

Joseph Brodsky Poems

 

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and later settled in the United States where he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1991. His early childhood was marked by poverty and the Siege of Leningrad where his family suffered severe starvation and nearly died. Born into a Jewish family, Brodsky suffered the antisemitism of his ...