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Apr 12, 1304
Fransesco Petrarch
Petrarch was a poet whose humanist philosophy set the stage for the Renaissance. He is one of the most well known forefathers of the modern Italian language. -
Apr 14, 1517
Henry Howard
Tudor poet Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was born in Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, England. He was the son of the third Duke of Norfolk. Associated with the royal court, he grew up at Windsor, where he was a childhood companion to the Duke of Richmond, son of Henry VIII. Surrey was also a first cousin to Anne Boleyn. Educated by tutors, he lived an eventful life as a soldier and a courtier, eventually marrying Lady Frances de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. -
Apr 14, 1552
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was born into the family of an obscure cloth maker named John Spenser, who belonged to the Merchant Taylors' Company and was married to a woman named Elizabeth, about whom almost nothing is known. -
Apr 14, 1564
William Shakespeare
While William Shakespeare's reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early nineteenth century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet the study of his nondramatic poetry can illuminate Shakespeare's activities as a poet emphatically of his own age, especially in the period -
Apr 14, 1572
John Donne
John Donne's standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured. However, it has been confirmed only in the early 20th century. The history of Donne's reputation is the most remarkable of any major writer in English; no other body of great poetry has fallen so far from favor for so long and been generally condemned as inept and crude. In Donne's own day his poetry was highly prized among the small circle of his admirers, who read it as it was circu -
Philip Sidney
The grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and heir presumptive to the earls of Leicester and Warwick, Sir Philip Sidney was not himself a nobleman. Today he is closely associated in the popular imagination with the court of Elizabeth I, though he spent relatively little time at the English court, and until his appointment as governor of Flushing in 1585 received little preferment from Elizabeth. -
John Milton
John Milton’s career as a writer of prose and poetry spans three distinct eras: Stuart England; the Civil War (1642-1648) and Interregnum, including the Commonwealth (1649-1653) and Protectorate (1654-1660); and the Restoration. When Elizabeth I, the so-called Virgin Queen and the last of the Tudors, died, James VI, King of Scots, was enthroned as Britain’s king. Titled James I, he inaugurated the House of Stuart. His son and successor, Charles I, continued as monarch until he lost the Civil War -
Michael Drayton
In late-seventeenth-century estimates of literary stature, Michael Drayton ranks only slightly below Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson. Until the middle of the twentieth century, Drayton's position as an important minor poet seemed secure, but his lengthy historical poems did not lend themselves to the techniques of close reading popularized during the vogue of New Criticism in the 1940s and after. -
Thomas Wyatt
Born in Kent, England, Sir Thomas Wyatt was an ambassador to France and Italy for King Henry VIII. Wyatt’s travels abroad exposed him to different forms of poetry, which he adapted for the English language — most notably, the sonnet. Rumored to be Anne Boleyn’s lover, he spent a month in the Tower of London until Boleyn’s execution for adultery. Many consider his poem “Whoso List to Hunt” to be about Boleyn. -
Thomas Gray
Born in Cornhill on 26 December 1716, Gray was the fifth of twelve children of Philip and Dorothy Antrobus Gray and the only one to survive infancy. His father, a scrivener given to fits of insanity, abused his wife. She left him at one point; but Philip Gray threatened to pursue her and wreak vengeance on her, and she returned to him. From 1725 to 1734 Thomas Gray attended Eton, where he met Richard West and Horace Walpole, son of the powerful Whig minister, Sir Robert Walpole. -
Charlotte Smith
Charlotte Smith wrote Elegiac Sonnets in 1783 while she was in debtor’s prison with her husband and children. William Wordsworth identified her as an important influence on the Romantic movement. She published several longer works that celebrated the individual while deploring social injustice and the British class system. -
Helen Marie Williams
Helen Maria Williams was a British poet, novelist, essayist, and translator known for her support of radical causes, such as abolitionism and the French Revolution. Born in London, Williams was educated by her mother and began publishing her poetry and essays with the help of her mentor, Dr. Andrew Kippis. -
William Lisle Bowels
Born to the Reverend William Thomas Bowles and Bridget (Biddy) Grey Bowles at King's Sutton near Banbury in Northamptonshire, Bowles was the son and grandson of clergymen and a descendant of a notable Wiltshire family. In 1769 his father received the living of Uphill and Brean in Somerset, a rural area overlooking the great estuary of the Severn, not quite fifteen miles to the northeast of Nether Stowey, where Coleridge settled in 1797 and where he and Wordsworth collaborated on Lyrical Ballads -
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland. The Wordsworth children—Richard, William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher—remained close throughout their lives, and the support Dorothy offered William during his long career has attained legendary status. John Wordsworth, William's father, was legal agent to Sir James Lowther, Baronet of Lowther (later Earl of Lonsdale), a political magnate and property owner. Wordsworth's deep love -
Percy Byshshe Shelley
Born on 4 August 1792—the year of the Terror in France—Percy Bysshe Shelley (the “Bysshe” from his grandfather, a peer of the realm) was the son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley. As the elder son among one brother, John, and four sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, Margaret, and Hellen, Percy stood in line not only to inherit his grandfather’s considerable estate but also to sit in Parliament one day. In his position as oldest male child, young Percy was beloved and admired by his sisters, his parents, an -
John Keats
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, his parents deceased when he was very young. -
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
As a child and a young woman Elizabeth Barrett was extremely fortunate in the circumstances of her family background and environment. Her father, whose wealth was derived from extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica, was the proprietor of "Hope End," an estate of almost 500 acres in Herefordshire, between the market town of Ledbury and the Malvern Hills. In this peaceful setting, with its farmers' cottages, gardens, woodlands, ponds, carriage roads, and mansion "adapted for the accommodation of a -
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born 12 May 1828 in London, the second child and eldest son of Italian expatriates. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a Dante scholar, who had been exiled from Naples for writing poetry in support of the Neapolitan Constitution of 1819. Rossetti’s mother had trained as a governess and supervised her children's early education. Few Victorian families were as gifted as the Rossettis: the oldest child, Maria Rossetti, published A Shadow of Dante (1871) and became an Angl -
George Meredith
Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England. His father inherited a seemingly prosperous Portsmouth naval outfitters and tailor shop from Meredith's grandfather but soon discovered that one reason for the shop's popularity with customers was that delinquent bills were rarely pursued. The Merediths ran the failing business at a loss for several years while living extravagantly on the dowry that Meredith's mother had brought into the marriage. Considering themselves superior to ordinary tradespeople, -
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I. -
Robert Frost
Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet,” writes James M. Cox, “it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry.” In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as para -
Christina Rossetti
Her poetry has never disappeared from view, and her reputation, though it suffered a decline in the first half of the twentieth century, despite all of this she still remains releveant to this day. -
E.E. Cummings
"Among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets," according to Jenny Penberthy in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, E. E. Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, u -
Countee Cullen
In view of America's racial climate during the 1920s, Harlem was scarcely a serene place, but it was an enormously stimulating milieu for Afro-American intellectuals. The high hopes of the black community for acceptance and equality had turned to disillusionment at the end of World War I, when returning black soldiers all too often experienced unemployment and were otherwise mistreated. Resentment pulsated through black urban centers like Harlem, which had burgeoned during the war as black worke -
John Berryman
Born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914, Berryman suffered a great loss at 12 when his father shot himself outside the boy’s window. This event haunted him throughout his life, and recurred as a subject in his poetry. After his mother remarried, John took his stepfather’s name and lived in Massachusetts and New York City. -
Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell is best known for his volume Life Studies, but his true greatness as an American poet lies in the astonishing variety of his work. In the 1940s he wrote intricate and tightly patterned poems that incorporated traditional meter and rhyme; in the late 1950s when he published Life Studies, he began to write startlingly original personal or "confessional" poetry in much looser forms and meters; in the 1960s he wrote increasingly public poetry; and finally in the 1970s he created poems -
Claude McKay
Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems challenging white authority in America, and from generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America to more philosophically ambitious fiction addressing instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the black individual’s efforts to cope in a raci -
John Hollander
John Hollander was one of contemporary poetry’s foremost poets, editors, and anthologists. Over the course of an astonishing career, Hollander influenced generations of poets and thinkers with his critical work, his anthologies and his poetry. In the words of J. D. McClatchy, Hollander was "a formidable presence in American literary life." Hollander’s eminence as a scholar and critic was in some ways greater than his reputation as a poet. His groundbreaking introduction to form and prosody Rhyme
