Poets

John Betjeman, son of Ernest Edward Betjemann (a furniture manufacturer) and Mabel Bessie Dawson, was born at Parliament Hill Mansions, north London. John adopted his style of spelling the family name around the age of twenty-one (the name can be traced back to Dutch or German origin). After attending Byron House Montessori School, where he was briefly taught by T. S. Eliot, Betjeman went on to enroll in Magdalen… Read more

Cartoonist, political satirist, poet, and writer of fiction, Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. He enlisted very young in the 9th Indiana Infantry in the American civil war and had risen to the rank of lieutenant by its close. He then travelled to care for his brother Albert in San Francisco, the only member of his family on whom he was on good terms, and embarked on a career in angry political… Read more

For more poems, see the Academy of America Poets

the… Read more

James A. Bland, perhaps the greatest African-American folksong writer, was born in 1854 in Flushing, New York. His father, who received a law degree from Howard University, was the first African American appointed examiner to the United States Patent Office. Bland grew up in Philadelphia, and started performing music professionally by the age of fourteen and writing songs by the age of fifteen. He performed for… Read more

Edward Dickinson Blodgett, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada, has authored seventeen books of poetry. His Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano (1996) won the Governor- General's Award for English language poetry.

Louise Bogan was born in Livermore, Maine, August 11, 1897, and was educated at the Girls' Latin High School and Boston University, which she left without taking a degree. Her first marriage, to Curt Alexander, an army officer, in 1916, was effectively over by 1918. Their daughter Maidie was born Oct. 19, 1917, but was raised by Bogan's parents. Alexander died in 1920. In 1923, a year after she received the first of… Read more

Lucille Bogan, (nee Armstrong) was born in Amory, Mississippi, on April 1, 1897 and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She married Nazareth Bogan, with whom she had two children. Bogan, who also used the pseudonym Bessie Jackson, was a blues writer and performer, known for her explicit lyrics, which covered topics such as sex, prostitution and alcoholism. She first recorded in 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia, after which she… Read more

For more poems, see the Griffin Prize

and The Academy of America Poets

and… Read more

A late Victorian English poet from Buddington, Sussex, Francis William Bourdillon was born on March 22, 1852, educated at Worcester College, Oxford, and acted as tutor to the Prince and the Princess Christian at Cumberland Lodge. He published 13 volumes of poems from 1878 to 1921. One poem of the nearly 500 he wrote secured his fame, "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes." He also did scholarly editing of poems and… Read more

Little is known of this soldier-poet of the First World War. At least three of his poems were originally published in The Stars and Stripes, an eight-page weekly brought out in France by the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) of the United States Army from February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919. These three poems were also selected for an anthology that came out in book form in 1919: "If I were a Cootie," "The R.T.O," and… Read more

One of the greatest poets of the 17th century, Anne Bradstreet was born in Northamptonshire, England, ca. 1612-13, daughter to Thomas Dudley, a clerk, and Dorothy Yorke. By 1619 Dudley became steward to the earl of Lincolnshire at Sempringham, and three years later acquired Anne's future husband, Simon Bradstreet, as an assistant, freshly graduated from Cambridge University. After a short separation when the Dudleys… Read more

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. He received a James King of Irrawang Travelling Scholarship, which allowed him to study at the… Read more

Turner, Katherine. "Brereton, Jane (1685–1740)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP.

Robert Bridges was born October 23, 1844, in Walmer, Kent. Educated at Eton College from 1854 to 1863, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1863 to 1867, where he took a B.A., and finally at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he completed his M.B. in 1874. He served as a physician successively in London at St. Bartholomew's Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street, and at the Great… Read more

Gilbert E. Brooke was born March 28, 1873, at Hyères, France, and educated at Monkton Combe School near Bath (1884-88), Pensionnat Georgens, Ouchy, Switzerland (1889-90), Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A. 1894; M.A., 1901), London Hospital (1894-96; L.R.C.P., L.R.C.S.), and Edinburgh (1897; D.P.H. 1902). After signing on as a ship's surgeon, Brooke became Government medical officer in the Turks and Caicos Islands in… Read more

Rupert Brooke was born August 3, 1887, at Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated there and at King's College, Cambridge, which he left with a degree in 1909. His first book of verse, Poems, came out in 1911. After studying briefly in Munich in 1912, he returned to live in England at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire. The next year he travelled abroad in Canada, the United States, and the south seas,… Read more

Charles William Shirley Brooks was born on 29 April, 1816 at 52 Doughty Street, London. The son of Elizabeth and William Brooks (an architect), he was articled to his uncle Charles Sabine of Oswestry after receiving his early education. In 1938, he passed the Incorporated Law Society's examination, but there is no record of Brooks becoming a solicitor. Brooks began his writing career in 1842 as a journalist for… Read more

Poet, novelist and newspaperman Charles Bruce was born in 1906 in Port Shoreham, Nova Scotia. After graduating from Mount Allison University in 1927 with a Bachelor of Arts, he joined the Canadian Press in Halifax and was transferred to Toronto in 1933. Among his six collections of poetry is The Mulgrave Road, which won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry in 1951. Bruce died on December 19, 1971 in Toronto.

Although not a South African, but rather educated at Haslemere, Alice Mary Buckton's The Burden of Engela (1904) well described the life of a Boer woman on a Transvaal farm during the Anglo-Boer War. (Thanks to André le Roux, Reference section, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, for assistance.)

Professor Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, chair of the Department of Botany, University of Manitoba (1904-36), was born in Birmingham on August 19, 1874. He obtained his Ph.D. at Leipzig before joining the university. His best-known academic work was Researches in Fungi, 7 vols. (1909-34), for which he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1909, its President in 1927, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in… Read more

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, near Bedford, and baptized Nov. 30, 1628, the son of a tinker, and like his father a tinker. He joined joined the parliamentary forces in the English civil war in 1644. On leaving, he married in 1646 a pious woman whose only dowry was two books, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly's The Practice of Piety. They had four children. In 1657 Bunyan joined the Baptist church and… Read more

Born in Boston on January 30, 1866, Frank Gelett Burgess graduated from M.I.T. in 1887 with a B.Sc. and went to work as a draftsman, eventually becoming an instructor at the University of California at Berkeley. His gift was comic verse and fiction. In 1895-97 he edited The Lark in San Francisco and from then on contributed to magazines and published humorous novels, poems, and stories, including his elaborately… Read more