Poets

Born May 6 (some sources say May 7), 1861, in Calcutta, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the prolific writers in the world, poet, artist, dramatist, musician, novelist, and essayist. He was completely at home both in Bengali and in English, in part because he was educated at University College, London, in 1879-80. He had become the national poet of Bengal by the time of his Golden Jubilee in Calcutta on January 28,… Read more

Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 8, 1884, and received her education at the Mary Institute. Until her marriage in 1914 to Ernst B. Filsinger, a businessman, she lived either in St. Louis or Chicago; afterwards, she lived mainly in New York. She began publishing verse in Harriet Monroe's journal, Poetry. In her first three books of poetry, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907; about famous… Read more

Born July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, William Makepeace Thackeray was sent to England in 1817 at his father's death. He was educated at the Charterhouse School in England from 1822 to 1826 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829-30 but left without graduating. At first unsuccessful as a journalist, Thackeray came into his own in writing for Fraser's Magazine, Punch, The Times and other journals, especially in… Read more

Celia Laighton was born June 29, 1835, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and grew up on the Isles of Shoals. In 1851 she and Levi Thaxter married, came to live in Newtonville, Massachusetts, by 1856, and had several children. When she discovered that the editor of The Atlantic Monthly had published her poem "Land-locked" without her permission in March 1860, she started writing poetry and stories for popular journals like… Read more

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and raised in Worcester, Thayer graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in philosophy in 1885 after editing the Harvard Lampoon. Its business manager, William Randolph Hearst, hired Thayer as humour columnist for the San Francisco Examiner 1886-88. His last piece, dated June 3, 1888, was a ballad entitled Casey. Although it made him famous, and Thayer recited it at a Harvard class… Read more

The works of Dylan Thomas are in copyright and may only be published with permission of his publisher.

For a biography, see the Dylan Thomas Home Page, owned by the City and County of Swansea and managed by the Dylan Thomas Centre; and

Born March 3, 1878, in London, Edward Thomas had his education at St. Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford University, from which he graduated in 1900 with a history degree. Having married Helen Noble in 1899 and with a baby son, Merfyn, to support, Thomas became a professional writer. In his brief 15-year career he produced over two dozen books and many dozens of reviews. He focused on local history and literary… Read more

Tichborne was executed for having become a party to a Catholic plot to murder Elizabeth. Although not quite as young as his farewell poem suggests, written within three days of his death, the verses were famous in the period.

Poet, playwright, and pioneer of the Irish literary movement, John Todhunter was born in Dublin on December 30, 1839, and educated at medical school in Trinity College, from which he graduated M.B. in 1867 and M.D. in 1871. In Dublin he acted as Visiting Physician at the Cork Street Fever Hospital and, from 1870 to 1874, Professor of English Literature at Alexandria College. He re-settled in Bedford Park, London, in… Read more

Born at Farnham in Surrey, Toplady took an M.A. at Trinity College, Dublin, and proceeded to holy orders in the Anglican church in 1762. He became vicar of Broad Hembury six years later. George Lawton wrote the biography in Within the Rock of Ages: The Life and Work of Augustus Montague Toplady (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1983; BV 330 T6 L3 Emmanuel College Library). The parson's dairy survives and was published in 1987… Read more

After lying in manuscript for over two centuries, two autograph volumes of poetry and prose by Thomas Traherne were discovered in a London bookstall in 1896 and were thought by A. B. Grosart to be the work of Vaughan. After Dr. Grosart died, the MSS came into the hands of the bookseller Bertram Dobell, who identified their author and published the Poems in 1903, the prose Centuries of Meditations (`century' meaning… Read more

Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the American journalist, novelist and humorist born and raised in Missouri, Mark Twain is best known for his novels, The Prince and the Pauper (1882), A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Selected Letters are edited by Charles Neider (New York: Harper and Row, 1982; PS 1331 A4 1982… Read more

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) published some early poetry before 1900 but then disappeared completely from the literary scene until 1917 when La jeune Parque came out in print. Like Mallarmé, Valéry is an implacable perfectionist, and he demands of form what the older poet sought in harmonic effects. Valéry is above all an intellectual poet whose work requires a real effort on the part of the reader. His influence on the… Read more

For more poems, see the Academy of America Poets

and The Poetry Foundation

Born November 10, 1852, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and educated in theology at Brooklyn Polytechnic, Princeton, and Berlin, Henry Van Dyke worked twenty years as a minister, first in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1879 to 1883 and next in New York until 1899. His Christmas sermons, his essays, and his short stories made him a popular writer. His poems reveal a classical education as well as a common touch in matters of… Read more

The poems by Vaughan printed here are from Silex Scintillans ("Sparkling Flint") 1655, but all except "The Star," "They are all gone into the world of Light," and "The Water-Fall" were first published in a 1650 edition of Silex Scintillans to which a second part was added in 1655.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a youthful poet frequented the coterie of Leconte de Lisle where his verses were favourably received. Shortly after his marriage in 1870, Verlaine met Arthur Rimbaud, and in 1872 he abandoned his wife and child and went away with the young poet to Belgium and England. After a quarrel in which Rimbaud was shot and wounded, Verlaine was imprisoned for two years. At this time he sincerely… Read more

François Villon is France's first great poet. Born in 1431, he is known to have studied at the University of Paris between 1449 and 1452. Villon disappeared from view in 1463 but in the record of his brief career there are many accounts of encounters with university authorities and the police. It was during an imprisonment in 1461 that Villon wrote his Grand Testament where he laments his wasted opportunities and… Read more

For more poems, see the Academy of America Poets

and The Poetry Foundation

Derek Walcott's works are in copyright. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained from his publishers.

For a brief biography of the poet, see the Nobel Foundation Web site.

British-born novelist, children's playwright, and poet, educated in Point Levy, Quebec, and Sarnia, Ontario, where she and her sisters operated a school for ladies, Walker published poetry widely in newspapers on both sides of the border before collecting them in Leaves from the Backwoods in 1861-62. She returned to England to work for her cousin, Margaret Oliphant, a well-known novelist, and edited her Autobiography… Read more

This South African poet brought out The Gods of Africa and other Poems in London in 1912 and whose later poem, "Eve," was first published for a centenary collection of South African verse in 1925. He appears to have lived once in Pretoria. Francis Ernley Walrond was born in Edinburgh and educated at Rugby. He moved to South Africa in 1904 and earned a living there as a bank manager, in Pretoria, it seems, until his… Read more

Anna Letitia Waring was born at Plas-y-Velin, Neath, on April 19, 1823. She left her parents' faith, the Society of Friends, for Anglicanism, into which she was baptised on May 15, 1842. Her life-long avocations were the study of the Bible (in self-taught Hebrew), the writing of hymns, a love of animals, and charitable work for prisoners. Her Hymns and Meditations (1850) reached its 17th edition in 1896 and was… Read more

John Byrne Leicester Warren, Lord De Tabley, was a literary scholar, a numismatist, and a botanist. Born April 26, 1835, Warren was educated at Eton College and then at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated B.A. in 1859 and MA one year later. Between 1659 and his death in 1895, Warren published a dozen volumes of poetry, the last two of which -- Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical (1893) and its second series (1895… Read more