Phineas Fletcher was an Renaissance poet and dramatist whose pastoral play, Sicelides: A Piscatory, was originally intended to be performed at Fletcher’s college in Cambridge in front of King James I. Unfortunately it was only ready for staging after the king had left so it lay dormant until publication in 1631, some sixteen years later. Born on the 8th April 1582 at Cranbrook in Kent, the ...
Pierre-Jean Jouve was a French poet and novelist. Born towards the end of the 19th century he lived for a good part of the 20th and established a reputation as one of his country’s best poets of that time. His most notable work was the anti-war poetry that he wrote, often in grisly and graphic detail, that left the reader in no doubt as to ...
Royall Tyler was an American poet, playwright and member of the legal profession. He was born on the 18th June 1757 in Boston, Massachusetts into very comfortable circumstances, his father being a wealthy merchant. He was sent to Boston Latin School and then on to Harvard University where he was a popular student and a friend of the future lawyer and politician Christopher ...
Rachel Bluwstein was a Russian-born poet who emigrated to Palestine at the age of 19 and became known as simply Rachel, or Rachel the Poetess. She was born Rachel Bluwstein Sela on the 20th September 1890 in Saratov, a town in Imperial Russia. She came from a large Jewish family, being her mother Sophia’s eleventh daughter. She was not an especially healthy child, ...
Philippe Desportes, his name sometimes written as Desports, was a late 16th century French poet and royal courtier who held prestigious posts such as secretary to the Bishop of Le Puy and advisor and personal poet to the Duke of Anjou. While accompanying the bishop he had the opportunity to spend time in Italy and he made use of his time by studying ...
