Born in the Tuscany city of Arezzo in 1492, Pietro Aretino was one of the most influential people in Italy at the time. A poet and satirist and occasional blackmailer, he was a powerful presence in the royal court and earned the name ‘the scourge of princes’. He once had to run from Rome after the publication of his infamous, and ...
Born in Yorkshire in 1871, Ralph Hodgson was a poet who many saw as a traditionalist antidote for the modernist movement of the early 20th Century. He wrote most of his poems during a period in his 30s and 40s, publishing a number of collections including The Skylark and Other Poems. His most famous single work, The Bull, is one of the ...
Born in Sheffield in England in 1863, Oliver Herford was a poet and artist who was often compared to Oscar Wilde for his flamboyance, wit and style. His father was a Unitarian minister and when Herford was just 12 years old the family moved to America settling first in Boston but then moving to Chicago. Herford received a good education throughout ...
An influential poet in the 60s and 70s in Finland, Pentti Saarikoski was born in Impilahti in 1937. His parents and family came from middle-class Finnish stock, his father working at one time as a journalist but also as a civil servant. The greatest influence on his poetry, however, came from his mother who hailed from Karelia, the heartland of what ...
René Daumal was a 20th century French poet, novelist, playwright and translator whose work could, mostly, be described as spiritual in nature. Literary critics also used the term para-surrealist. He was well known for his pieces on perception and spirituality and he clearly had strong Eastern influences, being self-taught in the Sanskrit language. He was also a pataphysicist which means that he ...
