Unknown

Alexander Pope, born in London at 6:45 p.m. on 21 May 1688 to linen merchant Alexander Pope and his second wife Edith Turner Pope, became the defining poetic force of his age. His poetic accomplishments contrast sharply with the physical disabilities and trying circumstances that plagued him.

Edgar Poe was born on Jan. 19, 1809, to David Poe Jr. and a widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Hopkins (née Arnold), both actors. Edgar and his sister Rosalie were orphaned in Richmond, Virginia, when their parents died of illness in December 1811. Taken in by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan, Edgar was baptised Edgar Allan Poe two years later.

Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936, in Detroit, of mother Bert Bunnin Piercy and father Robert Douglas Piercy. She was brought up Jewish by her mother and grandmother. In Early Grrrl, Marge Piercy says, "I started writing poetry regularly and seriously when I was fifteen and my family moved into a house larger by far than we had ever lived in.

Born near London at Gunnersbury on September 14, 1883, Marjorie Pickthall emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto in 1889. After receiving her education at Bishop Strachan School for Girls, she worked in the library of Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she helped compile a bibliography of Canadian poetry.

Carole Gerson (Canadian Poetry From the Beginnings Through the First World War [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994]: 112) notes that Phillips emigrated from Liverpool to Canada in 1865 and worked as a journalist, rising to the position of President, Ottawa Press Gallery, by 1896.

Born on December 30, 1676, at Bampton, Oxfordshire, John Philips was educated at Winchester from 1691 and Christ Church, Oxford, from 1697. Of his poems, The Splendid Shilling (1701), at first published anonymously, and Cyber (1708) were the most highly regarded in his time. The first imitated Milton, and the second Virgil's Georgick.

• Palmer, Roy. "Percy, Thomas (1729–1811)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

• Irving, John. "Peerson, Martin (1571–1650/51)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.