Mostly well-known for being a novelist, particularly for his work Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray was also a poet of some repute and published a number of verses during his lifetime. He was born in Calcutta, India, in 1811 but his father died just a few years later and his mother promptly sent the young Thackeray back to England where ...
Born in 1825, William McGonagall was a Scottish poet and actor who is largely accused of writing some of the worst doggerel poetry of all time, including his most famous work The Tay Bridge Disaster. Though he often failed to appreciate the fundamental building blocks of poetry, much of his later popularity came from the humor that his poor writing seemed ...
Born in 1590, William Bradford was a puritan and poet who formed part of the Pilgrim Fathers that landed at Plymouth in the Americas of 1620. Whilst he is widely known for his journal of the crossing on the Mayflower and the colony’s struggle to survive, Bradford was also a prolific poet in his later years. He was born in Yorkshire to ...
Not many medieval poets will have the distinction of being considered, even today, “modern”, but William Dunbar fits neatly into that category. Born in the 15th century, in Scotland, his words are, at first, a challenge but once you have got used to the dialect of that time, his messages are surprisingly contemporary in places. In many poems he adopts a curious, ...
Saigyo was a 12th century Japanese poet who elected to become a Buddhist monk at the young age of 22 having lived a privileged life up to then. He originated from a noble family and, as an elite warrior of the Imperial guard, he had close connections with the Emperor both during his term of office and after retirement. He lived at ...
