Anyone who has heard the hymn Amazing Grace sung either in a stadium or in church will know the work of poet John Newton who was born in London in 1725. Son of a merchant seaman and trader, he worked aboard slave ships in Africa and the West Indies before becoming an abolitionist in later life. Newton lost his mother to tuberculosis ...
Born in 1926 in Baltimore, Frank O’Hara went on to become the leader of the New York School that boasted such luminaries as John Ashbury, Alice Notley and Kenneth Koch. His poetry, like that of many writers at the time, moved away from the stuffy academic verse of the past to a more musical and immediate style that often reads ...
Armed with a large vocabulary and a disdain for convention, American poet John Ashbury has won almost every major award for his work, including a Pulitzer in 1976. He was born in New York in 1927 but was brought up on a farm near Lake Ontario and began writing poetry at a very early age. Influenced by poetic contemporaries such as ...
Born in 1946 in London at the end of the Second World War, Michael Rosen is most well-known for his large collection of children’s stories and poems. His father was a secondary school teacher and professor of English and his mother worked both as lecturer and for the BBC. Indeed, some of Rosen’s earliest work was broadcast on a series she ...
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1905 Mary Elizabeth Frye is forever associated with her one most memorable poem, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep. She was orphaned at the age of 3 and grew up to become a florist and housewife. She had never written a poem in her life but the obvious heartache of a young woman ...
