Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of P…
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horatius, with whom he…
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a prolific 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the …
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of…
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian playwright and dramatist; one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays …
Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his…
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (19…
William Blake (November 28, 1757 - August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in …
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer t…
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems …
Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mo…
Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but co…
Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist…
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yea…
Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 1894 - 1940) was a Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author o…
Robert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is gen…
Coleman Barks is an American poet. Despite the fact that he admittedly speaks no Persian, he is world-renowned as a translator of Rumi and other mystic poets of Persia. Barks taught literature at the …
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Par…
Collections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual a…
Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.…
