If ever there were an American poet that could be immortalised by the writing of a single poem then Clement Clarke Moore was such a man. He will not have known it at the time that he wrote A Visit from St Nicholas purely to amuse his own children but this poem, when published in a New York newspaper just before the ...
Born around 1516 into an aristocratic family, Henry Howard helped to found a renaissance in English poetry. Distantly related to one of the wives of Henry VIII, Catherine Howard, he was brought up in Windsor along with Henry Fitzroy with whom he had a long and enduring friendship. As a young man he grew up to be an ...
Edith Wharton rose from her American middle-class, socialite origins to become a famous writer and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence which was published in 1921. This story was later dramatized on film, the latest version being the Academy award-winning production in 1993 starring Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. Another story, The ...
Born in 1772 towards the back end of the Le Dynasty in Vietnam, Ho Xuan Huong is considered one of the country’s greatest poets. Brought up at a time of turmoil and conflict, little is known about her life but her work earned her the title of The Queen of Nom Poetry. Considered one of the cultural icons of Vietnam, ...
Edith Nesbit was an English writer who used the shortened “E. Nesbit” on her book covers. She was an active socialist who transferred her political ideals into her stories that were, on the whole, for children. She did this by moving away from children’s story telling methods used by the likes of Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. These authors created alternative, ...
