Poets

For more poems, see The Poetry Archive:

Letter to a City Under Siege

The Academy of America Poets

Stephen Foster was born July 4, 1826, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Allegheny Academy, Athens Academy, and Jefferson College. He became a full-time musician in 1850, working for and with Christy's Minstrels, Campbell Minstrels, and the New Orleans Serenaders. His songs made him famous with the public. Married to Jane Denny McDowell, and with one daughter, Foster moved to New York City in 1860, but he… Read more

Obituary on TimesonLine (November 5, 2004).

Born and dying in Winslow, Buckinghamshire, Sarah Fyge was twice married, first unwillingly to a lawyer, Edward Field, who died leaving her a well-off widow without children, and second very unhappily, and publicly so, to the much older Reverend Thomas Egerton, rector of Adstock, who died in 1720. Fyge's first publishing success was The Female Advocate (1686), her polemical reply to an attack on women that argued that… Read more

Rose Amy Fyleman was born on the outskirts of Nottingam on 6 March, 1877 to Emilie (née Loewenstein) and John Feilman. Her mother had immigrated from Russia, while her father's family was situated in Germany seventeen years prior to Rose's birth. As a young girl, Fyleman was educated at a private school, and at the age of nine first saw one of her compositions published in a local paper. Although she entered… Read more

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) started out as a painter, but he soon turned to literature. He gained a livelihood as a journalist and critic, writing poetry and novels in his spare time. Gautier excels in descriptions, and one can see in them the influence of his early interest and training in the plastic arts.

Born in 1809, Kasiprasad Ghose graduated from Hindu College, Calcutta, in 1828, and went on to edit a weekly newspaper, The Hindu Intelligence. His only volume of poems, The Shair and Other Poems, came out in 1839. He died in 1873.

Perceval Gibbon, a native of Wales, was educated at Baden and became a journalist on South Africa's now defunct Rand Daily Mail. He was a short-story writer and a poet.

Ruth Gilbert was born at Greytown, New Zealand, in 1917, daughter of Florence Margaret (Carrington), a music teacher, and Henry George Gilbert, a Prebyterian minister and violin-maker. In 1945 she married John B. Mackay (1918-95), a doctor, and has four children. Her poetry appeared first in magazines and anthologies in Commonwealth countries and then in ten personal collections published in New Zealand and England.… Read more

Marc-Antoine Girard, Sieur de Saint-Amant (1594-1661) was an adventurer and bon vivant. As an officer and diplomat, he served in Spain, Italy, England, and Poland. His poetry is extremely varied in style, ranging all the way from the tenderly lyrical to fierce burlesque.

Phyllis Gotlieb, born in Toronto on May 25, 1926, to parents who owned a movie theatre, received her B.A. (1948) and M.A. (1950) from the University of Toronto. She published five volumes of poetry from 1964 to 2002, one of them nominated for a Governor General's Award. In 1964 she published the first of nine novels of science fiction, Sunburst, after which the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic… Read more

Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield (John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps), the representative of the British monarch in Canada, established the annual Governor General's Literary Awards in 1936 for the best books of the year. These are the most prestigious such awards in Canada. "Poetry or Drama" was a category from 1937 to 1980, after which it became "Poetry." When the… Read more

Julian H. F. Grenfell was born March 30, 1888, and died in battle on May 26, 1915, a captain in the Royal Dragoons. For a biography, see Nicholas Mosley, Julian Grenfell, his life and the times of his death, 1888-1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976).

The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry is the world’s largest prize for a first-edition single collection of poetry written in or translated into English by a living poet and published in the previous year. Chairman Scott Griffin founded the Griffin Trust in April 2000.

Trustees of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry are Margaret… Read more

Francis Grose (ca. 1731-1791), born in Middlesex, served for more than twenty years in the army, particularly the Hampshire and then the Surrey militia, until he emerged as one of the period's greatest antiquarians. He published The Antiquities of England and Wales in 1772-76, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785, and subsequently other antiquarian collections on Scotland, Ireland, and the English… Read more