Romantic poet Robert Southey was born in Bristol in 1774 and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of his time. Now often overlooked in the literary wake of such giants as Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was the poet laureate for over thirty years and had a profound effect on the literary landscape. He was brought up from the ...
Jack Spicer had a curious name for the short poems that he wrote in the early part of his writing career. He called them “one night stands” and this was actually part of the title of one of his published collections (One Night Stands and Other Poems, pub 1980). He was at his peak in the 1950s when he and a few ...
Famous for his epic works and love poems, Ovid was born in Rome in 43BC and is often viewed alongside some of the classical greats such as Horace and Virgil. Popular amongst his contemporaries, much academic effort has been expended on the mystery of his exile by the emperor Augustus. His most well-known work is a 15 book epic charting the ...
Perhaps best known for her novel Little Women, Louisa May Alcott was also an accomplished poet who was born in Pennsylvania in 1832. Contemporary to the likes of Thoreau and Emerson, she was brought up in an intellectual and transcendental environment that fueled her future search for perfection. As a child she was considered wild and a bit of a ...
Henry Vaughan was hailed by Samuel Johnson as one of the metaphysical poets, who were a group of seventeenth century British poets whose works were described as witty, elaborate and original and which questioned the meaning of spirituality and religion. Henry Vaughan and his twin brother Thomas were born on April 17th 1621 (by Vaughan’s own reckoning), in Brecknockshire (now Breconshire), south ...
