At various times a journalist, university lecturer, and even pub landlady, poet Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England. Thanks to a scholarship, she studied literature at Oxford and there began writing poetry, publishing her first collection in the 1950s. After some time working on newspapers in the UK, Joseph moved for a while to South Africa to write ...
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American doctor, poet, professor and author. Born 29th August 1809 in Cambridge, in Massachusetts USA he was the firstborn son to Sarah Wendell, who came from a wealthy family and Abiel Holmes, a Calvinist Church minister. His son of the same name would go on to be a prominent justice of the Supreme Court of ...
Phillip Edward Thomas is one of the names on a slate stone in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, which commemorates the sixteen “Great War Poets”. It is alongside the likes of Wilfred Own and Rupert Brooke, so Thomas’s name will therefore be immortalised as a war poet although most of his work was written before he ever went to war. In ...
Festus Claudius McKay was born in September 1889 in Jamaica. His parents were well off but still classed as peasant farmers, although being landowners of sufficient standing they had the vote. His father’s roots were in Western Africa - the Ashanti people - while his mother’s were in Madagascar. Claude’s early years were spent happily in Jamaica and he did not emigrate ...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ,the supremely gifted man with a vast wealth of knowledge of many different subjects was an exceptional poet. Not only was he a great writer of poetry, prose and drama but he was also a pictorial artist. Remarkably he was also an accomplished scientist, a specialist biologist and a theoretical physicist. His work in plant and animal morphology ...
