Nâzım Hikmet has been described as the first modern Turkish poet. He was born Nâzım Hikmet Ran in 1902 in Salonika which was, at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire but is now Thessaloníki in Greece. His father was a civil servant with the Foreign Service. Nâzım was probably steered towards poetry by his grandfather, who was a poet himself, and ...
John Greenleaf Whittier was born on the 17th December 1807 in Massachusetts to a farming Quaker family. His was a poor upbringing. The farm made little money but had to support Whittier’s extended family plus farm employees. He suffered ill-health throughout his life. Despite a lack of formal education he was an avid reader of books and fell in love ...
Born in 1898, in a little town called Fuente Vaqueros which is not far from the southern Spanish city of Granada, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca became one of his country’s most celebrated poets. His talents extended to writing plays as well as directing them and he was a part of the famous Generación del 27, a group of ...
Born in the middle of the 16th Century, Edmund Spenser was a poet who managed to portray a distinctive voice at a time when classical literature as we know it in England was still in its formative stages. He is probably best known for an unfinished epic poem, steeped in allegory, entitled The Faerie Queene that is also notable for being ...
Born out of Moscow’s nobility in 1799, Alexander Pushkin has long been thought of as the founding father of Russian literature and one the greatest poets of all time. For a man who barely lived 38 years before his untimely death, following an ill judged duel in 1937, it is a testament to his poetic vitality that he is still much ...
