Poets

Aaron Rafi is a Canadian poet, now living in Toronto, best known for his Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam (2006). Its 48 prose poems are spoken by the Russian poet Osip, his wife Nadezhda, a voice from Stalin's transit camps, and a researcher. In November 2006, Daniel Domb, Canada’s pre-eminent cellist, composed music to these poems, which were performed at the Leah Poslins Theatre.… Read more

Born November 15, 1881, Franklin P. Adams worked for forty years as a leading New York newspaper daily columnist and wit penning light verse and a weekly diary that amused a large and literate audience. A few years after graduating from the Armour Scientific Academy in Chicago in 1899, Adams first entered journalism in Chicago. Then, moving to New York, Adams successfully published mass-market light verse up to the… Read more

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. "Nearer my God to Thee" was one of thirteen hymns published by William Johnson Fox (1786-1864) in his Hymns and Anthems in 1841. They were… Read more

Florence Anthony, the poet, is known mainly by her pseudonym Ai. For more poems by her, see the Academy of America Poets

and The Poetry… Read more

Cecil Frances Humphreys was born at 25 Eccles Street, Dublin, and lived in Miltown House, county Tyrone, Ireland, beginning in 1833. She married the Right Reverend W. Alexander, Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, in 1850. She wrote nearly 400 hymns, among which her work for children established her reputation as a poet. See Selected Poems of William Alexander, Archbishop of Armagh, 1896-1911, and Cecil Frances Alexander,… Read more

William Allingham, born at Ballyshannon, published and edited verse from 1850 to his death in London on November 18, 1889. He worked for the customs service in London until his retirement in 1870, when he became sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine, then editor from 1874 to 1879. He married Helen Paterson, the water colourist. He was buried in St. Anne's Church cemetery, Ballyshannon, plot 201. His books of poetry include… Read more

Elleke Boehmer (editor of Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]: 470) gives what is known about Mary Frances Leslie Miller's marriage (to Ernest Ames, a railway engineer) and book, An ABC, for Baby Patriots (1899). She also illustrated her husband's book, The Tremendous Twins, or How the Boers were Beaten (1900).

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was the illegitimate son of a Polish mother whose name was Kostrowitzky. After desultory studies in Paris, he led a rather nomadic life until the First Great War in which he enlisted in 1914. He was wounded in 1916 and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Apollinaire has many moods and many styles. He can be simple and tender, coarse and vulgar, gay, ribald, intense. He is an… Read more

James Arthur's first book of poetry, Charms Against Lightning, was published as a Lannan Literary Selection by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic and The New Yorker. In 2003 he received an MFA from the University of Washington, and he is currently an Assistant Proffessor at Johns Hopkins University.

Bibliography:

Charms Against… Read more

Thomas Kyme, Anne's husband, expelled her from their Lincolnshire home, after Anne herself left him to preach in London, denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, which holds that the bread and wine of the Christian mass or communion are literally transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Anne held to the Protestant belief that the mass was an act of remembrance and spiritual communion with her God.… Read more

Born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, on July 25, 1825, John Askham had almost no formal education. After labouring as a child in his father's shoe-making shop, Askham earned his living as a shoe-maker. He taught himself to read and write and published his verses in local newspapers and then as volumes, financed by subscriptions. These books included Sonnets on the Months and other Poems (1863), Descriptive Poems… Read more

For more poems, see the Academy of America Poets

With Sir Theodore Martin, Aytoun was responsible for Bon Gaultier's Ballads (1845).

Mary Balfour published at least four books:

Born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, Anna Letitia Aitkin was educated at home by her mother, Jane Jennings. Her father became tutor in divinity at a new Presbyterian school at Warrington, Lancashire, where 15-year-old Anna became friends with Joseph Priestley and his wife when he moved there as tutor in languages in 1761. In 1772 Anna published her Poems (3rd edn., London: Joseph Johnson, 1773; B-12 0448 Fisher Library)… Read more

An often-published antiquarian, novelist, and travel writer, Baring-Gould was born in Exeter and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1864 he became curate of Horbury, Yorkshire, but moved to become rector of Lew Trenchard, Devon, in 1881, when he inherited his family estate there, and stayed until his death. William Ernest Purcell wrote a biography in Onward Christian Soldier: A Life of Sabine Baring-Gould,… Read more

Born at Indian Hill, Ohio, March 6, 1809, David Bates was educated as a clerk in Buffalo and then in a mercantile house in Indianapolis, Indiana. Eventually he rose in the company to be a full member and its buyer, and he and his family settled in Philadelphia. He contributed as a man of letters to journals and published a volume of poetry, Eolian, in 1849. His son Stockton, who published his collected works after his… Read more

Katharine Lee Bates, born August 12, 1859, graduated from Wellesley College in 1880, joined its English Department five years later, and earned a Masters degree there in 1891 following study at Oxford in 1888-89. She published the scholarly work for which she is best known critically, The English Religious Drama, in 1893, and edited many classics of English literature. One of her anthems, America the Beautiful, gave… Read more

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) spent most of his life in Paris, though one can see in some of his poetry the influence of an early voyage he made to the East Indies. His mother and stepfather had encouraged this trip in the hope that it would make Baudelaire forget about following a literary career. When Baudelaire returned to France he extravagantly spent the inheritance he received at the age of twenty-one from his… Read more

After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Joseph Warren Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate alma mater. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired. An expert in many literary figures -- Henry… Read more

Born in 673 and sent at seven years old by his parents to the monastery of St. Peter in Monkwearmouth, Bede moved to the abbey at Jarrow in 682, where he lived as a monk until his death on May 25, 735. For thirty years from his entrance into the priesthood about 703, Bede collected extracts from the church fathers and developed materials that would come out in his Lives of the Abbots and Ecclesiastical History, our… Read more

Rémy Belleau (1528-1577) was also a member of the "Pléiade" and an enthusiastic student of the classics. He imitated Anacreon in his Petites Inventions (1556), but is best known for his Bergerie (1565), a pastoral narrative interspersed with poems. Belleau excels in descriptive poetry and especially in the portrayal of nature of which "Avril" is the best-known example.

Bergonzi, Bernard. "Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre René (1870–1953)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

Born April 24, 1862, to Mary Sidgwick and Edward White Benson, future archbishop of Canterbury (1882-1896), Arthur Christopher Benson became a popular essayist of Edwardian England, the librettist of England's beloved anthem, "Land of Hope and Glory," and the editor of Queen Victoria's letters. Benson received his education at Temple Grove School, East Sheen, at Eton 1874-81, and at King's College, Cambridge, 1881-84… Read more