Poets

J. S. Martinez served in the British Honduras Territorial Force in World War I. He dedicated his self-published book of poems, Carribean Jingles, published in Belize about 1926, to Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable James Cran. The book's introduction expresses Martinez's "wish that these commonplace subjects depicting chiefly occurrences in our community and in our everyday life, may strike a tuneful chord and help to… Read more

All the poems of Marvell were published (three years after his death) in Miscellaneous Poems, 1681. Most of them cannot be accurately dated.

Edgar Lee Masters was born August 23, 1868, in Garnett, Kansas, and spent his youth in Shipley Hill, Petersburg, and Lewistown, Illinois. Masters in 1915-16 depicted the latter two communities in his Spoon River Anthology. Educated at Knox College in 1889-90, Masters went on to study the law and was admitted to the bar in 1891. He practised law and from 1903 to 1911 was partner with Clarence Darrow in Chicago. After… Read more

Nyla Matuk is a Canadian poet. She is the author of two collections, Sumptuary Laws (2012) and Stranger (2016), and a chapbook, Oneiric (2009). Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and literary journals in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., including The New Yorker, Poetry, PN Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Walrus, Canadian Notes and Queries, and The Literary Review of Canada. In addition, her work has been… Read more

James Clerk Maxwell was born on Nov. 13, 1831, at 14 India St., Edinburgh, to John Clerk Maxwell and Frances Cay. The family home to which he would at last retire was at Glenlair, but after his mother's death young James was sent to Edinburgh for schooling at the Edinburgh Academy, from 1840 to 1847. He excelled at both English and mathematics. His education continued at the University of Edinburgh (1847-50) and… Read more

McCreery was a clerk in the Office of the Assistant Attorney General in Iowa who authored one book of poems, Songs of Toil and Triumph, and one exceptionally famous poem, "There is no Death."

Born in about 1830 in Edinburgh of Irish parents, William McGonagall earned his living as a hand-loom weaver. He married Jean King on July 11, 1846. He heard, and obeyed, a call to write poetry in June 1877 and brought out a collection the next year, including a poem on the great Tay bridge in Dundee. An actor in Shakespeare plays performed locally, and a bard whom many held in contempt, McGonagall lived variously in… Read more

James McIntyre (1827-1906), an emigrant from Scotland, settled in Ontario in 1841. He founded a furniture factory and store in Ingersoll, Ontario, and used his skills at versifying to advertise his wares and to promote local agriculture, including cheese-making. He published two books of verse:

Claude McKay, born in Jamaica on September 15, 1889, came to America in 1912, the year his two books of Jamaican dialect verse came out, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. He studied agriculture for two years, first at Tuskegee in Alabama, and then at Kansas State University, but he left school for good to go to New York in 1914, where he worked at menial jobs, including (as Max Eastman remembers) dining-car… Read more

Herman Melville, born August 1, 1819, in New York City, was educated at the New York Male High School (1825-29), Grammar School of Columbia College (1829-30), and Albany Academy (1830-31). He entered service in merchant shipping in 1839 and travelled the seas until 1844. This life led him to pen novels of the sea, notably Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847… Read more

Charlotte Mary Mew (1869–1928) was a British poet whose work spanned the Victorian and modernist periods. Her first collection, The Farmer’s Bridge, was published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in 1916; a second collection, The Rambling Sailor, was published posthumously by the same in 1929. Though Mew opted to publish fairly infrequently in life, her work is notable for its rich dramatic monologues, attention to… Read more

Bruce Meyer, a professor of English at Laurentian University at Georgian College, has published 15 volumes of poems, edited many literary anthologies, and authored works of criticism. He is Artistic Director, Leacock Summer Literary Festival and frequently broadcasts on CBC Radio and TV, W Network, and TV Ontario. A servant of the arts in Canada, he founded and directed Canada's largest creative writing program, at… Read more

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, Maine. Educated in Camden and New York, she graduated from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1917. At first, she worked as a playwright, an actress, and a journalist for Vanity Fair while making a start as a writer by publishing three plays and four remarkable books of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems (1917), A Few Figs from Thistles (1920… Read more

David Mills was born in Palmyra, Orford Township, in southwestern Ontario, on March 18, 1831, the child of Nathaniel Mills, one of the first settlers in the area, whose farm was on lot 70, on Talbot Road (now King's highway 3), just north of Lake Erie and west of Clearville. After being educated at the University of Michigan, Mills became superintendent of schools for Kent Country from 1856 to 1865. In December 1860… Read more

Co-author of "The Whiffenpoof Song" with George S. Pomeroy.

Born on March 18, 1840, William Cosmo Monkhouse was educated at St. Paul's School from 1848 to 1856. He earned his living at the Board of Trade, in which he worked his way up from clerk to Assistant Secretary of the Finance Department. Privately, Monkhouse was a man of letters: a poet and a critic of art and literature. He published five volumes of verse between 1865 and 1901. His first wife was Laura Keymer, and his… Read more

Born November 4, 1771, in Ayrshire, Scotland, James Montgomery was brought up and educated by Moravians near Leeds after his parents left for America, never to return. He became an editorial assistant to the Sheffield Register in 1792. Acquiring the newspaper himself, he renamed it the Isis and in it advocated reformist causes at an unpopular time, during the French Revolution, and went to jail for his trouble twice… Read more

Lucy Maud Montgomery, born November 30, 1874, in Clinton, on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, Canada, grew up after her mother's death with her relatives in Cavendish. She started writing poetry in 1883 and published first in 1894 after training as a teacher at the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown. After one year at Dalhousie University in 1895, she taught in Belmont and Lower Bedeque, P.E.I., during… Read more

Born at Bungay, Suffolk, on December 6, 1803, Susanna Strickland was the sixth child in a family of eight. Educated at home, three of the Strickland children pursued literary careers. Like Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, and Samuel Strickland went on to write of their experiences in Canada. Susanna's career began in 1822 with the publication of Spartacus, A Roman Story. Thomas Harral, the editor of the London literary… Read more

William Vaughn Moody was born on July 8, 1869, in Spenser, Indiana, and his family moved in 1871 to New Albany. He obtained his B.A. (1893) and M.A. (1894) at Harvard University, where he became co-editor of the Harvard Monthly, and joined its English Department in the 1894-95 academic year as assistant to Louis E. Gates. Moody lectured at the University of Chicago in 1895 and stayed there until 1907 when, having… Read more

Moore's career was academic: born in New York, he took a B.A. from Columbia University in 1798 and from 1823 to 1850 was Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, whose site he in fact donated for the college. His Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language was published in 1809, but his fame came from a ballad that he said that he wrote in 1822 for his two… Read more

Marianne Moore was born November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, raised largely by her mother, a schoolteacher at the Metzger Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Marianne Moore entered Bryn Mawr in 1905. After graduation in 1909, she learned shorthand and typewriting at Carlisle Commercial College and joined the work force and by 1911 was teaching business at the United States Indian School in Carlisle. Moore moved… Read more

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer taught at the Normal School, Chaflin College, Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1895-96, and in 1897-98 and 1898-99 was an instructor in the second-grade Grammar School there. (I am grateful to Marilyn G. Pringle, Library Director at Chaflin, for undertaking the archival work that for the first time provides information on Moorer's life.)

For other poems, see the Griffin Prize

and The Poetry Foundation

"Mother Goose" begins as a 1729 English translation of the name of Charles Perrault's tale-teller in Contes de Ma Mere Loye (1697). The popularity of these tales as translated evidently led John Newbery to name his collection of songs Mother Goose's Melody about 1765. The nursery rhymes then spread to North America, as Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951: 37-42) shows. (There is no reason… Read more

Sachiko Murakami is a Canadian poet and editor. She is the author of The Invisibility Exhibit, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Rebuild. Currently, she is the Poetry Editor at Insomniac Press.

Bibliography

The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008)
Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011)