Festus Claudius McKay was born in September 1889 in Jamaica. His parents were well off but still classed as peasant farmers, although being landowners of sufficient standing they had the vote. His father’s roots were in Western Africa - the Ashanti people - while his mother’s were in Madagascar. Claude’s early years were spent happily in Jamaica and he did not emigrate ...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ,the supremely gifted man with a vast wealth of knowledge of many different subjects was an exceptional poet. Not only was he a great writer of poetry, prose and drama but he was also a pictorial artist. Remarkably he was also an accomplished scientist, a specialist biologist and a theoretical physicist. His work in plant and animal morphology ...
Ask people to name a classical Greek poet and most will probably mention Homer, author of such epic prose as The Iliad and Odyssey. For many, Homer is the beginning of poetry and one of the literary gods who set the standard for the future of literature. Not much is known about when he was born or whether he in fact existed at ...
Born in Pennsylvania at the end of the 19th Century, John Robinson Jeffers was a narrative and epic poet who believed you needed to dehumanize in order to explore the bigger picture. His father was a minister and his brother later went on to become a respected astronomer. Jeffers was always academically gifted and his mother and father always supported his ...
This 19th century poet, Roman Catholic convert and Jesuit priest only really became well known after his death. At a time when poets usually wrote in traditional verse Hopkins was considered innovative, even daring, using imagery and experimental exploration of poetic structures and speech rhythms. Hopkins was the first in a family of nine children and was born in Essex in July ...
When looking at the writers of the 19th century most people would place Charles John Huffam Dickens at the top of their list of truly great novelists and poets. His work endures even after almost 200 years because it is so good and many of his novels are still part of school and college literature studies all over the world. The characters ...
Alfred Noyes was an poet of English descent of some renown, publishing well-loved poems such as The Barrel Organ and The Highwayman. The latter is a particular favourite, as illustrated in 1995 by a BBC nationwide poll to find Britain’s Favourite Poem and The Highwayman came in ...
Here is a most unusual man – a poet who was heavily involved in the occult and mysticism. He also found time to be a ceremonial magician and an occasional mountaineer but his major project was to be the founding member of a new religious philosophy which he called Thelema. As this developed Crowley saw himself in the role of prophet and ...
This influential and much admired writer, christened Jean-Louis Kerouac, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. His parents were French-Canadian from Quebec and Jack, as he became known, grew up speaking French and did not properly master the English language until he was sixteen years old. By this time he had done reasonably well in High School and won a scholarship ...
Author and poet Henry David Thoreau was born into an unremarkable New England family in Massachusetts in 1817. He is undoubtedly one of the most famous Americans of the 19th century, an ardent philosopher, abolitionist, and historian. His interests were many and varied and his best known literary works, Walden and Civil Disobedience, have had a strong influence on many ...
