Countee Cullen was a very private man and there are conflicting accounts of where and when he was born. Details of his early family life are sketchy but seem, by all accounts, to have been extremely traumatic for him. The fact that he, through his own efforts and tenacity, dragged himself up to a level where he gained a masters degree and ...
Here is another of those poets who is generally known by his initials rather than by his full Christian names which were Alfred Edward. Housman is probably best known for his epic work A Shropshire Lad which was a collection of 63 different poems evoking the lost way of life of young men in rural areas towards the end of the 19th ...
Born in Kansas in 1868, Edgar Lee Masters was the author of a wide range of novels and books of poetry that set him up as one of the major literary voices of America. His collection of short poems, The Spoon River Anthology, is perhaps his most famous contribution to the art and was composed late on in life when ...
Born in Pennsylvania in 1879, American Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive turned poet and writer who won the Pulitzer in 1955. He went to public school and fell in love with the classics in Greek and Latin. He originally trained as a lawyer, attending Harvard initially and then a law school in New York. In his early twenties, Stevens married ...
Born in London in 1837, Algernon Swinburne became one of the most well-known poets of the Victorian age, producing verse that often shocked and shook the morals of the conservative elite of the city. The oldest of 6 children in a wealthy family, he was sent to Eton to begin his studies where he discovered his love of poetry and ...
