We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Born into the Elizabethan era, in 1554, Philip Sidney was known as a poet and soldier and was a prominent feature of the court at the time. He came from an influential family and was educated at Shrewsbury School and then Oxford, before being elected to Parliament at the age of just 18. Traveling widely through Europe in his youth, ...
Jessie Pope was an English poet, writer and journalist who divided opinion quite dramatically with her motivational style of poetry during the first world war. Almost every line she wrote seemed to be a call to arms, up and at ‘em and to hell with the Kaiser. While she was lauded by many as just the kind writer that was needed to ...
Born in 1913 in the heart of Utah, May Swenson grew up in a Mormon family, the oldest out of 10 children. She realized that she was a lesbian from an early age and was shunned in later life by her family who held strong religious beliefs. As a girl she was greatly influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe ...
Born in 1940 in Michigan, an orphan who spent his fifteenth year incarcerated in a mental hospital and faked his death at just the age of 26, Bill Knott, also known as Saint Geraud, was one of the most enigmatic American poets of the 20th Century. Often verging on the surreal, Knott’s poetry covers a range of subject matter from the way ...
Heinrich Heine was a Jewish born poet who became a highly controversial figure in German literature and was also something of a visionary. He quite clearly prophesied the terrible times to come for the Jewish people in a play that he wrote in 1821. In Almansor he wrote about the burning of books for political or religious reasons and the line: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, ...
Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote poetry in the Urdu language while holding strong political views all through his life that often got him into trouble with the law. He served a number of prison sentences because of his beliefs but it never changed him. He was a committed communist and was so highly thought of by the Soviets that he was awarded ...
There cannot be many writers in the world who have written a book and then had a seaside resort named after that book, but Charles Kingsley was such a man. He wrote a novel in 1855 called Westward Ho! about sailors from a south western English town who set sail across the Atlantic to battle with the Spanish in the Caribbean. The ...
The first thing that generally springs to mind when considering the great English writer C. S. Lewis is his epic collection of fantasy tales The Chronicles of Narnia. This was actually seven separate stories which can be bought in one bound collection and it probably sits on bookshelves in most houses – particularly if there are children in the house. It is ...
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 ...
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 ...
