Garcilaso de la Vega Poems

 

Garcilaso de la Vega was a 16th century Spanish poet and soldier whose love of the military life was to be his undoing. His life was cut short in his mid-thirties following wounds sustained at a battle in southern France in 1536. As well as being a renowned soldier of the Kings “Imperial Guard” he was also an innovative writer. He was ...

Ellen Bryant Voigt Poems

 

Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet who has spent a good deal of her life teaching creative writing. In 1976 she developed and became director of the first known low-residency, Master of Fine Arts degree course in Creative Writing in the United States. Now in her 70s, Ellen has published six collections of poetry as well as a number of craft ...

Weldon Kees Poems

 

Known as much for his mysterious disappearance as his artistic endeavors, Weldon Kees was born in Nebraska in 1941. He was a talented painter, poet and jazz musician who influenced many later American writers and is considered one of the major literary influences of the 20th Century. From humble beginnings – his father was a hardware manufacturer and his mother a teacher ...

Thomas Carew Poems

 

Poet and royalist Thomas Carew was born in 1595 in London, brought up in privileged surroundings because his father was master in chancery and his mother the daughter of the Mayor. He was most famous for being the poetic “arbiter elegantiae” at the court of the doomed king, Charles I. He is also noted for his intensely erotic poem A Rapture ...

Robert Southwell Poems

 

Born around 1561, Robert Southwell was a Catholic priest who wrote poetry and was one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales who were arrested, tortured and put to death by the state. Brought up amidst the Norfolk gentry of the time, Southwell enjoyed a privileged beginning to life, despite his family having Catholic sympathies. In 1576, Southwell went to Northern ...