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Lucille Clifton Poems

 

Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles into a working class New York family in June 1936.  Her father was a steel worker and her mother bore six children.  Graduating from High School Lucille won a scholarship to Howard University and then studied at the State University of New York at Fredonia, quite close to her home in Buffalo.  Aged 22 she ...

Alan Alexander Milne Poems

 

Alan Alexander Milne was the famous writer of the much-loved Winnie the Pooh stories and is more generally known as A. A. Milne.  Born in Kilburn, London in 1882 he spent his formative years living in a small independent school which his father, John Vine Milne ran.  A. A. was fortunate to have visionary novelist H. G. Wells as one of his ...

Kenneth Slessor Poems

 

Kenneth Adolf Slessor was born in Orange, New South Wales in 1901 to parents of German-Jewish origin.  The family name was originally Schloesser and they moved to Sydney when Kenneth was two years old.  The young boy loved to read and was encouraged by his parents to do so, along with teaching him to love music and appreciate good food.  In short, ...

Boris Pasternak Poems

 

Poet, writer and translator, Boris Pasternak is probably best known for his epic work Dr Zhivago. He was born in Moscow in 1890, the son of Russian Jewish parents who were heavily involved in the arts – his father was a professor and painter and his mother was a concert pianist, and they were close friends with Leo Tolstoy. Whilst he initially ...

J.R.R. Tolkien Poems

 

J.R.R. Tolkien will forever be known as the creator of such memorable characters as hobbits and wizards, and the mythical world of Middle Earth, but he was also a prolific poet. Born in South Africa in 1892, he came to England with his mother three years later for a long family visit, but his father died and they remained in the ...

Jonathan Swift Poems

 

Irishman Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 and is probably best known today for the fantasy work Gulliver’s Travels. As a satirist, cleric and poet he has influenced writers and artists down the ages, including John Ruskin and George Orwell. Although known for his writing, he also went on to become Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in ...

Sir Walter Scott Poems

 

Known for popular historical novels such as Ivanhoe and The Pirate, writer and poet Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1771. He is notable in that he was popular throughout his lifetime and earned an international reputation that was highly unusual for the time. Many of his works are still seen as classics today and they have been ...

Czeslaw Milosz Poems

 

Considered one of the greatest Polish literary figures Czeslaw Milosz was born the 30th June 1911 to a Catholic family in the small village of Szetejnie, which was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His father Aleksander was a qualified civil engineer, whilst his mother Weronika was of noble descent.  Fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian and French, he saw himself as ...

Lisel Mueller Poems

 

Lisel Mueller was born in Germany in 1924 but when the Nazi’s came into power her family immigrated to America where she became a much loved poet and translator. Her work explores the difference between what we present publicly and our private, individual selves that people rarely get to see. Over the years she has collected many literary awards including the ...

Geoffrey Chaucer Poems

 

Son of a wine merchant and born in London around 1340, Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered as the first truly great English writer and is most well-known for his work The Canterbury Tales. Familiar to literary students across the world, this series of poems recounts the stories of various people whilst on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and is written in Middle ...