Cancer

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a youthful prodigy. He began writing poetry in his early teens and, after running away from home, met Verlaine who took him under his wing. All of Rimbaud's poetry was composed before he reached the age of twenty, when he gave up writing for the life of an adventurer. In his most advanced poetry, Rimbaud abandons logic for suggestion.

Christopher John Brennan was born in Sydney, Australia in 1870 of Irish parents. Brennan first studied for the priesthood, but abandoned his vocation at St. Ignatius College for the University of Sydney. There Brennan concentrated on classics and philosophy, graduating from the University with first class honours in 1891.

• George M. Cohan, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There (New York: Harper, 1925).

For more poems, see the Academy of America Poets:
        The Watergaw
and The Poetry Foundation:
       from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

Recollections by V. M. Padmini Chettur (October 2006)

Born near Dublin on April 16, 1871, John Millington Synge studied at Trinity College Dublin. When he was travelling in Europe, he met W. B. Yeats in Paris in 1896, who advised him to return to the Aran Islands to find the well-springs of his writing. Synge did so and published The Aran Islands in 1906.

Born in London but educated in convents on the Continent and in England, Edith Nesbit started out as a writer of stories. In 1880, seven months pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a founding member of the Fabian Society when it was founded four years later.

Sarah Flower was born in Harlow, Essex, and married William Bridges Adams in 1834. Harold William Stephenson wrote a biography of this actress--Lady Macbeth, 1837--dramatic poet (Vivia Perpetua, 1841) and Unitarian hymn writer in The Author of Nearer my God to Thee in 1922.