Famous for writing poems in his native Dorset dialect, writer and poet William Barnes was born into a farming family in Bagber in 1801. He grew up speaking in the dialect of the day and saw his upbringing as idyllic, something which came across in his later pastoral poetry that celebrated the simple folk of the county. Barnes left school at 13 ...
Richard Aldington was an English poet, novelist and biographer and is one of the 16 First World War poets whose name appears on a stone in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. In addition to a volume of war poetry he published a novel in 1929 about the war called Death of a Hero. His popularity took a serious hit with a biography of ...
Activist, journalist and poet Subramania Bharati was born in Ettayapuram, India, in 1882. Brought up in the Tamil religion, he was one of their literary leading lights and his verses were characterized by their potent nationalism and patriotic fervour. Educated at the local Hindu college he was a precocious student who turned to poetry when he was just eleven years old. By ...
Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet of the 16th century who enjoyed the privileged position throughout most of his adult life of being a favoured poet of the Kings of France. He was generally accepted as the leading writer amongst a group of Renaissance poets called La Pléiade, a collection of talented poets of the time that included Joachim du ...
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American writer who packed a great deal into his relatively short lifetime which spanned the first half of the 20th century. Remarkably he had his first collection of poems published when aged only 17 and his final, epic piece of work (Western Star), won him the Pulitzer Prize even though it was unfinished when he died in ...
