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Matsuo Basho Poems

 

A master of the hokku, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) has helped readers achieve a deeper thought process through his works. Rumored to be the son of a samurai, which would surely account for his sense of honor and discipline, and confirmed as a scholar of Todo Yoshitdad the influences in his life made for very though provoking literature. Ever deemed a ...

Robert Louis Stevenson Poems

 

Perhaps one of the most well-known authors of pirate fiction, Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894) has solidified his position in literature as an author for all ages. It may come as a surprise that Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote a great deal of poetry, and while there is a selection that focus on the sea there are also a great many which do ...

Sappho Poems

 

There is little that one can find about Sappho’s (Estimated @200AD). The information which has been obtained has been criticized by scholars. Yet scholars tend to criticize a great many things dated I the early years of AD. From the documents which have been obtained we know that Sappho was a woman and that she had a daughter named Clis, apparently named ...

Phillis Wheatley Poems

 

Born in Senegambia, West Africa, in the 1753, Phillis Wheatley was sold into slavery at a young age and transported to North America, becoming one of the first black American literary voices and a prodigious writing talent. At 7 years of age, brought to Boston on a ship called the Phillis, she was purchased by a well to do merchant who ...

Edgar Albert Guest Poems

 

American poet Edgar Albert Guest was born in 1881 but went on to become wildly known as the People’s Poet, a reflection of the optimistic nature of his life’s work and his popularity. He was born in Birmingham, England, but came to the US at the age of 10 and soon after became a naturalized citizen. A newspaper man by profession, ...

Nazim Hikmet Poems

 

Nâzım Hikmet  has been described as the first modern Turkish poet.  He was born Nâzım Hikmet  Ran in 1902 in Salonika which was, at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire but is now Thessaloníki in Greece. His father was a civil servant with the Foreign Service.  Nâzım was probably steered towards poetry by his grandfather, who was a poet himself, and ...

John Greenleaf Whittier Poems

 

John Greenleaf Whittier was born on the 17th December 1807 in Massachusetts to a farming Quaker family. His was a poor upbringing.  The farm made little money but had to support Whittier’s extended family plus farm employees.  He suffered ill-health throughout his life.  Despite a lack of formal education he was an avid reader of books and fell in love ...

Federico Garcia Lorca Poems

 

Born in 1898, in a little town called Fuente Vaqueros which is not far from the southern Spanish city of Granada, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca became one of his country’s most celebrated poets. His talents extended to writing plays as well as directing them and he was a part of the famous Generación del 27, a group of ...

Edmund Spenser Poems

 

Born in the middle of the 16th Century, Edmund Spenser was a poet who managed to portray a distinctive voice at a time when classical literature as we know it in England was still in its formative stages. He is probably best known for an unfinished epic poem, steeped in allegory, entitled The Faerie Queene that is also notable for being ...

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin Poems

 

Born out of Moscow’s nobility in 1799, Alexander Pushkin has long been thought of as the founding father of Russian literature and one the greatest poets of all time. For a man who barely lived 38 years before his untimely death, following an ill judged duel in 1937, it is a testament to his poetic vitality that he is still much ...