Sharon Olds (Born 1942) is known for the bluntness in her poetry. Raised Calvinist but fully atheist, one will quickly realize that there is an aggressive opposition to the religious and socially acceptable standards. Where this is admirable to a point, especially in poetic works where one strives to go beyond that of the common man and definitively wants to ...
A poet with suicidal tendencies and a literary subtlety that outweighed many of her contemporaries, Sara Teasdale was born in 1884 in Missouri. From an early age she suffered from poor health and it wasn’t until she was 14 that she began to attend school. She received great exposure for her lyrical poems that seemed to reflect the changing perspectives of women ...
Son of the poet and publisher Louisa Lawson, Henry Lawson was born in New South Wales, Australia, in 1867. He went to school at Eurunduree but began to lose his hearing due to an ear infection and by the time he was fourteen was completely deaf. At a Catholic school in Mudgee, Lawson began to learn about poetry and reading, ...
This Bohemian-Austrian poet came into this world in 1875, with the name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke but many knew him as Rainer Maria Rilke. A very unhappy childhood was spent in Prague and this highly gifted child was forced into military school by his parents, much against his will. A kindly uncle recognised the unsuitability of this situation and ...
It's not often that a person becomes successful in two quite different strains of employment but William Carlos Williams was such a man. Not only was he a renowned poet, much associated with modernism and imagism, but he was also a general practitioner of medicine. His specialist area was paediatrics. Born in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey with an English ...
American writer and editor Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878, and went on to win no less than two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry. A colorful early life saw him leave school at the age of 13 to work odd jobs - delivering milk, harvesting ice, and even shining shoes. It was an upbringing grounded in the common ...
Famed for her caustic wit, Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 in New Jersey and was known from an early age for her uncompromising character. Her mother died when Parker was five and her father remarried a few years later. It was not a happy time for the future doyen of 20"s society. She refused to call this new woman either ...
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) is the younger sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (not to be confused with Dante Alighieri who wrote The Divine Comedy). She is known for her fantasy as well as her deeply erotic poetry. This is much different from her brother whose work was deeply troubling and apocalyptic in nature. Feminist tend to focus on the works ...
Traveling over the centuries have been the works of Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273). He is especially accepted by Muslims for his spiritual insights. However, non-Muslims have enjoyed the poetry of this theologian and Sufi mystic. For such work to still have poetic merit, there must be something within the works that is relevant to the time in which it is read. Otherwise, the ...
Born in Rockland, Maine in 1892, Edna lived much of her childhood without a father’s influence after he was shown the door by her mother. Edna was only seven years old at the time and her mother instilled a fierce determination into her three daughters that they should succeed in, and have an appreciation of, music and literature. It took ...
