Anne Spencer was an influential, African-American poet whose long life spanned the end of the 19th and much of the 20th century. Along with compatriots like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, Anne wrote about the struggles of black people to establish themselves in America. She was one of the driving forces behind the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movements of ...
The American poet Archie Randolph Ammons was one of those writers that defies categorisation. He wrote in an unusual style, sometimes without any punctuation. In fact one of his poems, the book-length Garbage, appears to be just one, elongated sentence which has been divided into sections and couplets. Despite being a piece of work that some might have difficulty reading and enjoying, ...
Irreverent and witty, poet Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and is often better known as critic who had a definite streak of cruelness when he was writing about poets that he didn’t much care for. Known for his plain speaking style, Jarrell went on to become the Library of Congress consultant in poetry, a role which later became ...
Poet Paul Valery was born in the Mediterranean town of Sete in 1871 before moving to the French city of Montpelier where he spent the majority of his childhood. Throughout his life and beyond, Valery was a poet, essayist and writer who was largely difficult to categorize. He grew out of the symbolist tradition of the time and was greatly influenced ...
The name of John McCrae will be, forever, associated with his famous poem In Flanders Fields which was reportedly written the day after the funeral of a close friend who was killed at the second Battle of Ypres in May 1915. Lt Alexis Helmer had been a former medical student of McCrae’s and his death affected him so much that he penned ...
