We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
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 ...
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 ...
Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and went on to win an international reputation for both his writing and his work as a translator. His work has embraced both the fantastical and the surreal, exploring wide ranging topics such as philosophy, religion and what was later called magical realism. Although more well-known for his short ...
At various times a journalist, university lecturer, and even pub landlady, poet Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England. Thanks to a scholarship, she studied literature at Oxford and there began writing poetry, publishing her first collection in the 1950s. After some time working on newspapers in the UK, Joseph moved for a while to South Africa to write ...
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American doctor, poet, professor and author. Born 29th August 1809 in Cambridge, in Massachusetts USA he was the firstborn son to Sarah Wendell, who came from a wealthy family and Abiel Holmes, a Calvinist Church minister. His son of the same name would go on to be a prominent justice of the Supreme Court of ...
Phillip Edward Thomas is one of the names on a slate stone in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, which commemorates the sixteen “Great War Poets”. It is alongside the likes of Wilfred Own and Rupert Brooke, so Thomas’s name will therefore be immortalised as a war poet although most of his work was written before he ever went to war. In ...
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 ...
