We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
James Weldon Johnson was a man of immense and varied talents, who was a novelist, poet and noted civil rights activist. He was born June 17th 1871 in Jacksonville, which is located in Florida, USA to James Johnson and Helen Dillet who was a musician and grammar school teacher. His father was a head waiter at a luxury hotel and it was the ...
Tupac Shakur, rap artist, actor and poet, was one of the best-selling music artistes ever, selling over 75 million records worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine rated him 86th out the top 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. He was nominated twice in his career; in 1995 for best actor in Poetic Justice and in 2004 for best song – Resurrection. He was born Lesane ...
Nizar Qabbani was a Syrian-born poet, lawyer and diplomat who lived for much of his life outside of the middle east where he was able to express himself with a great deal more freedom than would have been allowed in his homeland. His work was often seen as a homage to womanhood and he campaigned staunchly for their equal rights. Losing his ...
Imagine, if you can, writing something that will one day be known universally as "the Great American Novel." Mark Twain did just that with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was published in 1885. It’s predecessor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, came out nine years earlier and both became worldwide favourites and are still read today over a century later. Mark Twain ...
Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet of the early 20th century who lived and died with very little recognition from the general public although one critic in the literary business described him as “the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda”. Perhaps he would have become better known in his lifetime had he actually signed off all ...
Countee Cullen was a very private man and there are conflicting accounts of where and when he was born. Details of his early family life are sketchy but seem, by all accounts, to have been extremely traumatic for him. The fact that he, through his own efforts and tenacity, dragged himself up to a level where he gained a masters degree and ...
Here is another of those poets who is generally known by his initials rather than by his full Christian names which were Alfred Edward. Housman is probably best known for his epic work A Shropshire Lad which was a collection of 63 different poems evoking the lost way of life of young men in rural areas towards the end of the 19th ...
Born in Kansas in 1868, Edgar Lee Masters was the author of a wide range of novels and books of poetry that set him up as one of the major literary voices of America. His collection of short poems, The Spoon River Anthology, is perhaps his most famous contribution to the art and was composed late on in life when ...
Born in Pennsylvania in 1879, American Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive turned poet and writer who won the Pulitzer in 1955. He went to public school and fell in love with the classics in Greek and Latin. He originally trained as a lawyer, attending Harvard initially and then a law school in New York. In his early twenties, Stevens married ...
Born in London in 1837, Algernon Swinburne became one of the most well-known poets of the Victorian age, producing verse that often shocked and shook the morals of the conservative elite of the city. The oldest of 6 children in a wealthy family, he was sent to Eton to begin his studies where he discovered his love of poetry and ...
