Born in Maryland in 1913, Karl Shapiro was one of the youngest recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and was famous for denigrating his university in Virginia as a place where both blacks and Jews were treated with disdain. Shapiro’s early work was stoutly traditionalist but he quickly fell out of love with it, believing that it eventually stifled the creativity of ...
Born in Wisconsin in 1903, Lorine Niedecker was a poet influenced by the early work of the surrealists and imagists who became part of a loosely connected group of artists who were known as objectivists. Niedecker spent a large part of her life in the same rural setting, close to Lake Koshkronong, working in many jobs including a librarian and a ...
Aeschylus was the first exponent of the dramatic form now known as “The Greek Tragedy”. It has been said that the idea of writing tragedies came to him in a dream when ordered to do so by Dionysus, the God of the Grape Harvest. This occurred during an episode where the young Aeschylus was sent out from the city to watch grapes ...
Poet, critic and writer, Sterling A Brown was born in Washington in 1901 and was one of the foremost voices of African-American literature in the 20th Century as well as one of its greatest teachers. His father had been a slave and worked his way to become a minister and professor at Howard University which has played a major role ...
French poet and follower of the symbolist movement, Stephane Mallarme was born in Paris in 1842. A huge inspiration for the many writers and poets that followed, he was one of the major innovating forces in art in the mid to late 19th Century, although he spent much of his life in poverty. Born into a comfortable, middle class family, he was ...
