Poets

Frances Ellen Watkins was born September 25, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland. After receiving an education at her uncle's school, and working in a book store, she turned to publishing. A book of poetry entitled Forest leaves came out in 1845, no copy of which has survived. Five years later, Watkins left Maryland for Ohio to teach at Union Seminary near Columbus and then in 1852 at Little York, Pennsylvania. In 1854 her… Read more

A nonconformist, Watts was born in Southampton and after a relatively brief career as tutor, writer of a 1714 textbook on logic and the conduct of life used at Oxford, and minister of an independent congregation in Mark Lane, London, he retired in 1712 owing to illness and lived for many years as guest of Sir Thomas Abney at his estate Theobalds in Hertsfordshire. Watts' Divine Songs for the Use of Children, published… Read more

Born at Poole, Dorset, on January 30, 1837, as Julia Augusta Davies, Augusta Webster spent her young years on the ship Griper, stationed at such places as Banff Castle and Penzance, and then in 1851, at Cambridge. Her education was informal but she studied at the Cambridge School of Art. Thomas Webster and Augusta, who had published a volume of poems in 1860 under a nom-de-plume, Cecil Home, wed in December 1863. A… Read more

"Robert Stanley Weir (1856-1926) was born in Hamilton, in what was then Canada West. He took all his higher education in Montreal, and was qualified for both teaching and the law. He chose law and rose rapidly in the profession, becoming in due course, like Routhier, a judge first as Recorder of the City of Montréal and later to the Exchequer Court of Canada (now the Federal Court of Canada). He wrote both learned… Read more

As a child slave, Phillis Wheatley was shipped on the Phillis to Boston from West Africa, possibly the Gambia river region, on July 11, 1761, when she was about 7-8 years of age. Susanna Wheatley, a Christian and wife of merchant John Wheatley, purchased her. Taught by Susanna's daughter Mary, Phillis began writing by 1765. She first published a poem in a newspaper in 1767 at about 14 years old. The second time she… Read more

The 1813 edition of White's Selborne (viii-ix) gives the following biography: GILBERT WHITE was the eldest son of John White of Selborne, Esq. and of Anne the daughter of Thomas Holt, rector of Streatham in Surry. He was born at Selborne on July 18, 1720; and received his school-education at Basingstoke, under the Rev. Thomas Warton, vicar of that place, and father of those two distinguished literary characters, Dr.… Read more

Sambrook, James. "Whitehead, Paul (1710-1774)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Born in Huntington, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Walt Whitman was the second eldest of nine children. Out of school as early as 13, he soon started work as a typesetter, from 1836 to 1841 taught in schools, and thereafter worked as a journalist with many newspapers and magazines, becoming editor of the Democratic Brooklyn Eagle 1846-48 and of the Brooklyn Times 1857-59. His greatest… Read more

Very little is known of Isabella Whitney's life, other than what she says in her poems. She was a sister of Geoffrey Whitney, who came of a Cheshire family. Having published two volumes of non-religious verse, she is the first secular woman poet in England.

Born December 17, 1807, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, John Greenleaf Whittier, inspired by reading Robert Burns, wrote and published poems in local journals beginning in 1826. After a two-year education at Haverhill Academy, Whittier embarked on a lifelong career of journalism, editing one newspaper after another. A committed abolitionist, and a delegate to the first Anti-Slavery Convention in 1833, he won election to… Read more

Ella Wheeler, poet, novelist, and spiritualist, born November 5, 1850, in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, was educated at home and at the University of Wisconsin. For a quarter-century from her first volume of pro-temperance poems, Drops of Water (1872), she wrote sentimentally and prolifically about the conventional family, where the man earns the living and the woman stays at home and bears children. Her works proved… Read more

Ian Williams completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and works as an English professor. He has held fellowships or residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy. 

Williams is the author of Personals, shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything… Read more

William Carlos Williams served as a physician in his home town of Rutherford, New Jersey, from 1910 to 1951, and in hours after work wrote fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. He was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, educated at Horace Mann School in New York, and from 1902 until 1906 studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle. He interned at the French… Read more

"As late as 1953 it was impossible to publish Rochester's 'The Imperfect Enjoyment' and 'A ramble in St. James's Park' (Poems, xlix). And even after Judge John W. Woolsey's landmark decision in the Ulysses case in December 1933 'A ramble in St. James's Park' could still be called 'this unprintable poem' (Berman, 362) in 1964." (Ellis, citing R. Berman, 'Rochester and the defeat of the senses,' Kenyon Review 26 [Spring… Read more

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States (1913-21), founder of the Société des Nations (the League of Nations), and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.

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Constance Woodrow (1899-1937), née Davies, was born in
England but lived in Canada most of her life. She worked in Toronto
in its most respected bookstore, Britnell's, formerly just north of Bloor
on Yonge Street. Letters of Charles G. D. Roberts to Woodrow survive in the University of New Brunswick archives (series 1, box 1, files 38-39). Woodrow brought out two volumes of verse,
The Captive Gypsy (… Read more

Henry Clay Work, born on October 1, 1832, grew up in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of an active opponent of slavery, who helped thousands of slaves to escape north. Work took employment as a printer in Chicago in 1854, but in 1853, 1876-77, and 1882-83, Work wrote 75 songs, at first encouraged by the minstrel E. P. Christy, and then under contract to Root and Cady, music publishers. His only equals as composers of… Read more

Bertram Stevens in 1906 gives this biographical summary:

Born in Co. Down, Ireland, 6th August, 1869; son of Rev. W. Wright, author of "The Brontes in Ireland", etc. Arrived in New Zealand, 1887. Entered Congregational Ministry, 1898. Now stationed at Nelson, N.Z.

Wright published four volumes of poetry and went on to edit the poems of Henry Lawson.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was born at Allington Castle, Kent, in 1503, the son of Henry Wyatt and Anne Skinner. He was educated at St. John's College Cambridge, become a diplomat in the service of Henry VIII about 1526 and travelled to Italy first in 1527. After a brief imprisonment for his affair with Anne Boleyn in 1536, the king's second wife who was executed for treason, Wyatt went to Spain as English ambassador to Charles… Read more

All works by W. B. Yeats, although briefly out of copyright in the 1990s, re-entered copyright since then and can only be published by permission of the publishers or the poet's estate.

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