Poets

Robert Fuller Murray was born Dec. 26, 1863, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, of John and Emmeline Murray. In 1869 John took his son to Kelso, England, and then to York. He was educated at grammar schools in Ilminster and in Crewkerne. Murray then attended his beloved University of St. Andrews from 1881, succeeding more in English than in classical Greek. Lacking other opportunities, he became a research assistant to… Read more

Born at Keswick on October 13, 1844, Ernest James Myers received his education in classics at Cheltenham and Balliol College Oxford. He became a fellow of Wadham College in 1868, where he taught for three years, and then moved to London for twenty years to make his living as a translator and editor. Best known for his collaboration with Andrew Lang and Walter Leaf on books XVII-XXIV of Homer's Iliad (popularized in a… Read more

Shane Neilson was born in New Brunswick. He attended the University of New Brunswick, where he completed his BSc. He obtained his MD from Dalhousie University, his MFA from the University of Guelph, and is currently a PhD candidate at McMaster University. Neilson is the author of five collections of poetry, and a two time winner of the Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Award.

Bibliography… Read more

Émile Nelligan is one of the most celebrated and admired of Canada’s nineteenth-century poets.  He had only a brief career as a young poet, but produced some remarkable poems.

Born in Montreal on the 24th of December, 1879, Nelligan was the oldest child of David Nelligan, an Irish immigrant, and Émilie Amanda Hudon, a French Canadian.  Family life was difficult for Émile: he was caught between the… Read more

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. Caught in a marriage with four children and infidelities on both sides, and with the main responsibility for income, Nesbit wrote commercial novels and stories,… Read more

John Henry Newman converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and was ordained in Rome the next year. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Grammar of Assent (1870), and The Idea of a University (1873) are important treatises in nineteenth-century English thought. Besides his religious poetry, Newman also published two novels, Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856). He was named Cardinal in… Read more

Born in London on July 24, 1725, John Newton joined the merchant marine as a youth and had many adventures, including harsh service to a slave-trader. Rescued from this, and while returning home, Newton underwent a sudden religious conversion in March 1748 as he steered the ship through a storm. In England he married a childhood sweetheart, Mary Catlett, educated himself in classical and eastern languages, joined the… Read more

Born October 16, 1888, in New York, Eugene O'Neill is the 20th-century's best-known American dramatist. Educated at Princeton, he spent his early years working as a secretary in New York, as a gold-prospector in Honduras, as a seaman on trips to Buenos Aires, South Africa, and Southampton, and as a bit-player in his father's company. He wrote verse in these early years, but after spending six months in a sanatorium he… Read more

John Boyle O'Reilly, the greatest Irishman in America at the time of his death, was born at Douth Castle, Drogheda, Ireland, on June 28, 1844. After an education at the National School, and an early career in journalism, he enlisted in the Hussars and became a Fenian. Discovery of his revolutionary sympathies led to his trial for high treason and finally to exile in the penal colony in Australia. He escaped Australia… Read more

Born on March 14, 1844, in London, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy earned his living in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, which he joined as a junior assistant in the Department of Printed Books in June 1861. He eventually became a valued expert on reptiles. O'Shaughnessy published four volumes of poetry, in 1870, 1872, 1874, and posthumously in 1881. His most enduring poem, known from its first… Read more

Thomas William Ogilvie, the poet's grandson, corrects RPO when it asserts that the poet's nationality was Australian: "I can assure you that, while he spent a decade of his young adult life in Australia and wrote much of his verse there, he was definitely a Scot by nationality and a proud Borderer at that!" (August 8, 2007).

Simon J. Ortiz, poet, writer, storyteller, and Doctor of Letters, is author of over a dozen books, including Out There Somewhere, Men on the Moon, After and Before the Lightning, and Woven Stone. He is also the editor of numerous collections, including Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, and Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. He has taught at the University of New… Read more

For more poems, see the Academy of America Poets

and The Poetry Foundation

Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker was born on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey, the daughter of Henry Rothschild and Eliza Marston. She was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in New York. Her first job, writing captions for Vogue, led to a career in journalism, criticism, light verse, and short-story, play, and screenplay writing. She became drama critic of Vanity Fair and was a member of the Round… Read more

A prolific American actor and playwright, born in New York City, who wrote more than 50 plays, Payne was renowned for one thing only, the song "Home Sweet Home" from his opera Clari, performed first at Covent Garden on May 8, 1823. He acted as American consul at Tunis 1842-45 and 1851 until his death a year later.

Molly Peacock was born June 30, 1947, in Buffalo, New York, and grew up there. After obtaining her B.A. (magna cum laude) from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969, and her M.A. (with honors) at Johns Hopkins University, she worked in academic administration at Johns Hopkins for seven years before turning full-time to the writing of poetry. She was poet-in-residence for the Delaware State Arts… Read more

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. He also wrote Cerealia (1706) and a poem on the Battle of Blenheim (1705), against… Read more

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.

On August 11, 1836, Sarah Morgan Bryan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of Southern gentry. After her mother's death in 1844, she lived with different family members before entering Henry Female College in a four-year general degree program in 1855. She married a young poet, John James Piatt, on June 18, 1861, and followed him to Washington and eventually over to Ireland in his lifelong career in the US… Read more

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. Pickthall first published stories and poems in 1898 in the Toronto Globe and then very… Read more

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. For the first time, I had a room of my own with a door that closed and… Read more

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. After a five-year trip to England, the Allans returned to Richmond, where Edgar in school read… Read more

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. As a child, he survived being trampled by a cow but struggled with tuberculosis of the spine (Potts’ Disease) and crippling… Read more

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, born on October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, obtained an M.A. in Romantic literature after attending the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College from 1901 to 1906. His first job came as lecturer in French and Spanish at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1906, but his resignation was requested. In 1908 he left for England and lectured in medieval Romance literature at the… Read more