Universal Poetry

Biografie Aiken Conrad Potter Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. In his childhood Aiken experienced a considerable trauma when he found the bodies of his parents after his physician father had killed his mother and committed suicide. He was brought up in Massachusetts from the age of eleven by a great-great-aunt. Before entering...

Biografie McKay Claude Claude McKay was born in Jamaica, West Indies. He was educated by his older brother, who possessed a library of English novels, poetry, and scientific texts. At the age of twenty, McKay published a book of verse called Songs of Jamaica, recording his impressions of black life in Jamaica in dialect. In 1912, he travelled...

Biografie Harpur Charles Charles Harpur (1813�1868) is now recognised as the forefather of Australian poets. For nearly a century, his life and work remained largely inaccessible and underestimated. Recent scholarship has reassessed their intrinsic worth and increased his reputation. Modern critical opinion sees him as the most substantial of...

Charles Bukowski, born in 1920, began writing at a young age and was first published in the 1940s. Then Bukowksi gave up writing for the world of work and bars, not publishing, not writing, so the myth goes, for nearly twenty years. Ten of those years were spent roaming from odd job to odd roominghouse from the East coast to the West. The other...

Biografie Baudelaire Charles Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris. He made a name as an art critic and translator of Edgar Allan Poe, but his fame rests on the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. He visited Mauritius in 1841 but lived most of his life in Paris in poverty on a small allowance. He is pre-eminently the poet of the City, and an illusory...

Biografie Sandburg Carl Author-poet Carl Sandburg was born in the three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg on January 6, 1878. The modest house, which is maintained by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, reflects the typical living conditions of a late nineteenth century working-class family. Many of the furnishings once...

Biografie Dennis C Micheal James C J Dennis, Poet & Journalist was born in Auburn, South Australia, on 7 September 1876, he was christened Clarence Michael James, and afterwards given the confirmation name of Stanislaus. He preferred to be known as Den. After formal education in Gladstone, Laura and Adelaide, Dennis worked in a number of...

Anne Kingsmill was born in April, 1661, the third child of Sir William Kingsmill and Anne Haslewood. Sir William died only 5 months after Anne's birth. At the age of twenty-three, she went to the court of Charles II as a maid of honor (attendant) to the duchess of York. She married one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, but both she and her...

Biografie Lowell Amy Amy Lowell was born in 1874 at Sevenels, a ten-acre family estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her family was Episcopalian, of old New England stock, and at the top of Boston society. Lowell was the youngest of five children. Her elder brother Abbott Lawrence, a freshman at Harvard at the time of her birth, went on to...

Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark, N.J., June 3, 1926, is an American poet and leading apostle of the beat generation. His first published work, 'Howl and Other Poems' (1956), sparked the San Francisco Renaissance and defined the generation of the '50s with an authority and vision that had not occurred in the United States since T. S. Eliot captured...

English author often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850; he was appointed by Queen Victoria and served 42 years. Tennyson's works were melancholic and reflected the moral and intellectual values of his time, which made them especially vulnerable for later...

Aleksander Pushkin�s father was of the nobility. His mother had Abyssinian blood, and was descended from Hannibal, the Negro servant of Peter the Great. He lived in St Petersburgh and became an official in the Ministry of Affairs but was effectively banished to the Crimea before he was twenty-one. He eventually returned, and in 1831 married...

Aleister Crowley was born October 12th, 1875 at 36 Clarendon Square, Leamington, Warwickshire, England as Edward Alexander Crowley into a wealthy and religious family at the height of the Victorian era. Crowley despised and rebelled against his family at every turn, even renaming himself 'Aleister' to avoid sharing the same first name as his father,...

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond was born in Birkenhead. He was an only child. He was educated at Charterhouse but ran away to London at the age of 16, only to return home two weeks later. He went to Liverpool University and then moved to London where he worked in bookshops and then as an advertising copywriter. He went into hiding during World...

Biografie Paterson Andrew Barton Andrew Barton Paterson (later to use the pseudonym of "The Banjo" for his magazine writings; an alias derived from the name of a racehorse the family owned) was born of pioneering stock, near Orange in New South Wales, on 17 February 1864. He excelled not only in his studies but was an all-round...