Universal Poetry

James Macpherson

Macpherson is remembered for one of the most spectacular literary hoaxes of all time; the epic of Ossian. He was born on 27 October 1736 at Ruthven, Badenoch, the son of a farmer. He was educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, and in 1756 he became a teacher in his native village. Two years later he moved to Edinburgh to pursue a literary...

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James Joyce

Joyce was born in Dublin, where his father was a rates collector. He was educated at a Jesuit school and University College, Dublin where he studied philosophy and language. When he was still an undergraduate, in 1900, his long review of Ibsen's last play was published in the "Fortnightly Review". At this time he also began writing his...

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow was a powerful figure in the cultural life of nineteenth century America. Born in 1807, he had become a national literary figure by the 1850s and a world-famous personality by the time of his death in 1882 Longfellow attended Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, where he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, his lifelong friend...

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Henry Van Dyke

Henry Jackson Van Dyke was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Henrietta Ashmead and Henry Jackson Van Dyke, a respected Presbyterian clergyman. The son was influenced by his father's role as minister, though the boy was not necessarily a model child. As his father said of his two sons, "Paul was born good, but Henry was saved by...

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Henry Kendall

Biografie Kendall Henry Henry Clarence Kendall was the first Australian poet to draw his inspiration from the life, scenery and traditions of the country. In the beginnings of Australian poetry the names of two other men stand with his -- Adam Lindsay Gordon, of English parentage and education, Charles Harpur, born in Australia a generation...

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Henry Clay Work

He grew up in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of an active opponent of slavery, who helped thousands of slaves to escape north he too was also an active abolitionist and Union supporter . Work took employment as a printer in Chicago in 1854. But in 1853, 1876-77, and 1882-83, Work wrote 75 songs, at first encouraged by the minstrel E. P. Christy,...

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May, 1874. Though he considered himself a mere "rollicking journalist," he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless...

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Gerard Manley Hopkins

Priest and poet, G.M. Hopkins was born at Stratford in Essex, the eldest of eight children. His father ran a successful marine insurance business in London. The family moved to Hampstead in 1852. Hopkins attended Highgate School where he demonstrated great academic and artistic talent, and where he won a prize for his first surviving poem, 'The...

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George Meredith

Biografie Meredith George 1828�1909, English novelist and poet. One of the great English novelists, Meredith wrote complex, often comic yet highly cerebral works that contain striking psychological character studies. As a youth he attended a Moravian school in Germany and eventually became apprenticed to a London lawyer. He began his career as...

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George Herbert

George Herbert was born to a noble family in Wales; his mother was patron to John Donne who dedicated his 'Holy Sonnets' to her. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College Cambridge, where in 1620 he was elected to the prestigious post of Public Orator. His first two sonnets were sent to his mother in 1610. On the theme that the...

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George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron

Biografie Gordon Byron, Lord Byron George George Gordon Byron was the son of Captain John Byron by his marriage to the Scottish Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born with a club foot of which he was very self-conscious and educated in Aberdeen, where his family had moved to escape their debts, and at Harrow and Cambridge. Byron inherited the...

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Friedrich Von Schiller

Biografie von Schiller Friedrich Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was born in Marbach, W�rttemberg, of Lutheran parents. His father, Johannes Kaspar Schiller, was an officer and surgeon. He was ordered by The Duke Karl Eugen (Charles II) to attend the military academy instead of studying theology. The strict discipline, only strengthened his...

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Federico Garcia Lorca

Biografie Garc�a Lorca Federico Spanish poet and dramatist, Lorca was a talented artist and a member of the 'Generation of 1927', a group of writers who advocated avant-gardism in literature. Garc�a Lorca read law at the University of Granada. At the same time he studied music collaborating in the 1920s with Manuel de Falla, becoming an...

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Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became...

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Eugene Field

Eugene Field was an unusual poet. He was one of the few poets who wrote only children's poetry. That is how he got his nickname, The Children's Poet. It all started September 2, 1850, at 634 South Broadway in Saint Louis. That's where and when Eugene Field was born. He had one brother named Roswell, who was one year younger than he, and a...

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Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)

Biografie Johnson (Tekahionwake) Emily Pauline One of Canada's most popular and successful entertainers at the turn-of-the-century. The daughter of a Mohawk Native-Canadian father and an English mother, Pauline Johnson used the Mohawk name "Tekahionwake". Then, at the age of 31 when her society expected her to marry and have children, she began to...

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Emily Jane Bronte

Biografie Bront� Emily Jane Emily was one of six children born to Patrick Bronte, an Irish Anglican minister. She briefly attended school with her elder sister Charlotte, but spent most of her formative years at home in Yorkshire. Together with her sister Anne, to whom she was particularly close, Emily created a fantasy land inspired by the...

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Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson grew up in a prominent and prosperous household in Amherst, Massachusetts. Along with her younger siter Lavinia and older brother Austin, she experienced a quiet and reserved family life headed by her father Edward Dickinson.Dickinson's poetry is challenging because it is radical and original in its rejection of most traditional...

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Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Born on November 5, 1850, in Johnstown Center, Rock county, Wisconsin, Ella Wheeler from an early age was an avid reader of popular literature, especially the novels of E.D.E.N. Southworth, Mary Jane Holmes, and Ouida. Her first published work, some sketches submitted to the New York Mercury, appeared when she was 14 years old. Soon her poems...

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Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911, but spent part of her childhood with her Canadian grandparents after her father's death and mother's hospitalization. Of her childhood she noted, "My relatives all felt so sorry for this child that they tried to do their very best. And I think they did. I lived with my grandparents...

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning

An English poet widely read by her contemporaries, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born the eldest of eleven children in Coxhoe Hall near Durham. The family moved to Hope End in Herefordshire in 1809 where Elizabeth spent her childhood. An avid reader, she was educated at home where her father gave her access to his classical library. Her first...

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Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas was born to Welsh parents in London, and educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford. His father expected Edward to enter the Civil Service, but he was determined to make a living as a writer. Most of his time was taken up by journalism and books commissioned by various publishers, who paid him by the number of words...

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Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in 1892 in Maine, grew to become one of the premier twentieth-century lyric poets. She was also an accomplished playwright and speaker who often toured giving readings of her poetry. All of that was in her public life, but her private life was equally interesting. An unconventional childhood led into an...

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Edgar Lee Masters

Born Garnett, KA, Aug. 23, 1869. Educated at Knox College, IL. He studied law in his father's office and was admitted to the bar in 1891. Married Helen M. Jenkins, of Chicago, in 1898. Mr. Masters wrote several volumes of verse and several poetic dramas, which are now out of print, before he found himself in the "Spoon River...

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Edgar Allan Poe

Biografie Poe Edgar Allan Poe was born in Massachusetts, the son of travelling actors David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe. His mother died when he was two and his father was an alcoholic, so Poe went to live with a prosperous Scottish tobacco merchant, John Allan, in Richmond. Allan always refused to adopt Poe which led to bad feeling between the two of...

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Dylan Thomas

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914. After grammar school he moved to London where, in 1934, his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems, was published. At this early age, he revealed unusual power in the use of poetic diction and imagery; the volume won him immediate critical acclaim. Thematically, these poems and virtually all that...

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Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was born in West End, New Jersey, as the fourth and last child of Jacob (Henry) Rothschild, a garment manufacturer and Annie Eliza (Marston) Rothschild, the daughter of a machinist at Phoenix Armour. Parker's mother died in 1898. Jacob married in 1900 Eleanor Frances Lewis, a Roman Catholic; Parker never liked her stepmother. Eleanor...

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Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz was born December 8, 1913, in Brooklyn to Romanian immigrant parents. Their marriage however failed and this affected him all his life. Inspite of his unhappy and unsettled childhood though he was was a gifted and intellectual young student. He enrolled early at Columbia University, also studied at the University of...

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David Herbert Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both...

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Constantine P Cavafy

A Greek poet, published only about 200 privately printed poems. Cavafy has come in recent years to be regarded as a the greatest Mediterranean poet of modern times.Constantine P. Cavafy was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (or Kabaphs) in Alexandria, Egypt, into a wealthy merchant family. Originally the family came from Constantinople, Turkey,...

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