We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Born in 1926 in Baltimore, Frank O’Hara went on to become the leader of the New York School that boasted such luminaries as John Ashbury, Alice Notley and Kenneth Koch. His poetry, like that of many writers at the time, moved away from the stuffy academic verse of the past to a more musical and immediate style that often reads ...
Armed with a large vocabulary and a disdain for convention, American poet John Ashbury has won almost every major award for his work, including a Pulitzer in 1976. He was born in New York in 1927 but was brought up on a farm near Lake Ontario and began writing poetry at a very early age. Influenced by poetic contemporaries such as ...
Born in 1946 in London at the end of the Second World War, Michael Rosen is most well-known for his large collection of children’s stories and poems. His father was a secondary school teacher and professor of English and his mother worked both as lecturer and for the BBC. Indeed, some of Rosen’s earliest work was broadcast on a series she ...
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1905 Mary Elizabeth Frye is forever associated with her one most memorable poem, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep. She was orphaned at the age of 3 and grew up to become a florist and housewife. She had never written a poem in her life but the obvious heartache of a young woman ...
Born in 1914 in Oklahoma, American poet John Berryman is most well remembered for Dream Songs, a combination of two previous books comprising 365 poems that he felt should be read as one work. Although born in Oklahoma, his parents moved to Florida but tragedy struck early on when Berryman was just 12 years old – his father committed suicide, an ...
Born in New York in 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s life didn’t get off to the best of starts. His father tragically passed away 6 months before his birth and his mother found herself detained in an asylum shortly after he was born. He was brought up by his Aunty Emily, who became his ward and brought him to Strasbourg for the first ...
Known for his sentimental poems and patriotic war songs, Thomas Campbell was a Scottish poet born in Glasgow in 1777. The son of a merchant, by the age of 21 Campbell had already achieved a certain amount of fame Pleasures of Hope and he was very much considered a poet of his time, though his popularity began to wane even during ...
Archibald Lampman was born in 1861 in a small village called Morpeth, close to the shores of Lake Erie in Canada. His father was an Anglican priest who moved the family when Archie was six years old to Gore"s Landing on Rice Lake, Ontario but the young boy soon fell ill with a severe rheumatic fever which damaged his heart and left ...
Denise Levertov was born in Essex in 1923. Her mother was Welsh while her father was a Russian born Hassidic Safardic Jew who migrated first to Germany and then to England. He later became an Anglican priest. At the tender age of five she declared that one day she would be a writer. True to her word she had a passion for ...
English playwright, poet and actor Ben Jonson was born in London June 11th 1572 to a family believed to be of Scottish descent. His clergyman father died before he was born and his mother remarried. He was fortunate to receive a classical education at the prestigious Westminster School, paid for by a family friend. Jonson wanted to continue his education at Cambridge ...
