Librarian

José-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905) was born in Cuba of a Spanish father and a French mother. Educated in France, he became the disciple and close friend of Leconte de Lisle. Like the latter, he cultivates erudition, impersonality, and perfection of form. Heredia excelled in sonnets, and these were made into a collection by him in 1893 under the tide Les Trophées.

• "Jose-Maria de Heredia." Representative French Poetry. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. 91-94.

Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894) was born on Reunion Island off East Africa. He studied law in France but spent his life as a journalist and translator. Like Vigny, he is a pessimist, but he refuses to express his personal despair. He turns for inspiration to the classics and the Orient. In his cult of perfection of form with erudition, Leconte de Lisle had great influence on the younger poets of his day.

• "Leconte de Lisle." Representative French Poetry. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. 86-91.

Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) belonged to a distinguished family. After brilliant studies, he became a popular member of fashionable society and began to write poetry and plays. The great event in Musset's life was an unhappy love affair with George Sand (1833-4), which inspired his most poignant works (the "Nuits" On ne badine fas avec l'amour, and so on) but left him broken in spirit.

• "Alfred de Musset." Representative French Poetry. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. 67-74.
• de Musset, Alfred. Oeuvres-complètes. Paris: Charpentier, 1876. Internet Archive

Christopher John Brennan was born in Sydney, Australia in 1870 of Irish parents. Brennan first studied for the priesthood, but abandoned his vocation at St. Ignatius College for the University of Sydney. There Brennan concentrated on classics and philosophy, graduating from the University with first class honours in 1891. He received a James King of Irrawang Travelling Scholarship, which allowed him to study at the University of Berlin. However, Brennan returned to Sydney in 1894 without the doctorate, due to both his attraction to the Berlin intellectual society and an affair with Anna Werth, his landlady’s daughter. In 1897 he married Anna Werth in Sydney, and they had four children. The marriage faltered after 1907, and Brennan became a well-known presence in Sydney’s café society. Brennan was heavily influenced by European Symbolist poetry, and in 1913 he published Poems, which has remained his most well-known work. In 1920 Brennan was appointed professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Sydney. He had long wanted this post, but the wait may have been due to his alcoholism and the eroticism in his 1897 poetry collection. He was dismissed by the University Senate in 1925 due to the controversy over his divorce and subsequent affair with Violet Singer. In his last years Brennan was often depressed as a result of Singer’s death in 1925; he also lived in poverty, helped by occasional teaching opportunities, friends and relatives. Brennan died in 1932.

• Clark, Axel, "Brennan, Christopher John (1870-1932)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. VII. Melbourne University Press, 1979. 397-99. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A070405b.htm
• Brennan, Christopher. XXI poems: MDCCCXCIII-MDCCCXCVII: towards the Source.. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1897.
• --. Poems: 1913, Sydney: G. B. Philip and Son, 1914. See Australian Poets eTexts Project, The Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS)
• --. A Chant of Doom: and other Verses. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1918. Digital facsimile by the University of Sydney Library, 1999. See http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit
• --. The Burden of Tyre. Sydney: Harry F. Chaplin, 1953.
• --. The Verse of Christopher Brennan. Ed. A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1960.
• --. The Prose of Christopher Brennan. Ed. A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962.
• --. Christopher Brennan. Ed. Terry Sturm. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984.

We are grateful for access to AustLit in the preparation of these poems.

• McClaurin-Allen, Irma. "Audre Lorde". Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Thadious M. Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1985. pp. 217-222.

• Lorde, Audre. The First Cities. Introduction by Diane di Prima. Providence, RI :Poets Press, 1968.
• --. Cables to Rage. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1970.
• --. From a Land Where Other People Live. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1973. PS3562 .O75 F7 Robarts Library
• --. The New York Head Shop and Museum. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1974.
• --. Coal. New York, NY: Norton, 1976. PS3562 .O75 C6 Robarts Library
• --. Between Our Selves. Crested Butte, CO: Eidolon, 1976.
• --. The Black Unicorn. New York, NY: Norton, 1978. PS3562 .O75 B55 Robarts Library
• --. Chosen Poems Old and New. New York, NY: Norton, 1982. PS3562 .O75 C4 1982 Robarts Library
• --. Our Dead Behind Us. New York, NY: Norton, 1986. PS3562 .O75 O8 1986 Robarts Library
• --. Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New. New York, NY: Norton, 1992. PS3562 .O75 C4 1992 Robarts Library
• --. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance. New York, NY: Norton, 1993.
• --. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York, NY: Norton, 1997. PS3562 .O75 A17 1997 Robarts Library

• Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002.
• Bevington, Helen. Dr. Johnson's Waterfall, and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1946.
• --. Nineteen Million Elephants, and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1950.
• --.A Change of Sky, and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1956.
• --.When Found, Make a Verse Of. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.

• Baker, William. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 184: Nineteenth-Century British Book-Collectors and Bibliographers. Ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack. The Gale Group, 1997: 138-151.
• Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

Born March 17, 1832, in Percy, Northumberland, Joseph Skipsey was a colliery worker at seven years of age. He made himself educated, publishing verse in local newspapers until he was gradually able to leave harsh labour behind him. He earned a living as caretaker to schools and colleges. He and his wife Sara Ann Hendley, married in 1854, had eight children. Skipsey had several literary positions: Assistant Librarian, Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society (1863), and custoldian of Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon (1889-91). He was awarded a annual civil list pension in 1880 for his literary work, which included preparing popular editions of important poets. Skipsey died at Gateshead on Sept. 3, 1903, and was interred in Gateshead Cemetery.

• Langton, John. "Skipsey, Joseph (1832–1903)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
• Skipsey, Joseph. A Book of Miscellaneous Lyrics. Bedlington: George Richardson, 1878.
• --. Carols from the Coalfields. London: Walter Scott, 1886.
• --. The Collier Lad, and Other Lyrics. 1864.
• --. Poems. Blyth: William Alder, 1871
• --. Poems, Songs, and Ballads. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1862.
• --. Selected Poems. Ed. Basil Bunting. Sunderland: Ceolfrith Press, 1976. PR 5452 S74A17 1976 Robarts Library
• --. Songs and Lyrics. London: W. Scott, 1892. PR 5452 S8S6 1892 Robarts Library
• Watson, Robert Spence. Joseph Skipsey, his Life and Work. London: T.F. Unwin, 1909. PR 5452 .S8Z96 Robarts Library

Thomas Pringle was born January 5, 1789, in Blaiklaw, Roxburghshire, and educated at Kelso and afterwards, in 1805, at Edinburgh University. He became clerk, Commissioner of the Public Records of Scotland, and co-editor, Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and Constable's Magazine, in 1817. He married Margaret Brown on July 19 in that year and published his first book of poems, The Autumnal Excursion, in 1819. When he was 30 years old, they led a party including his brother, father, and stepmother, and her sister, to South Africa. They departed on February 18, 1820, and arrived on June 29 at Eildon Kloof, close to present Glen Lynden district. After the settlement had laid down good roots, he went to Cape Town in September 1822 to become Government Librarian. By 1824 he had become co-editor of the South African Commercial Advertiser and had opened a school. Two years later he left South Africa for London, where he did literary work and served as Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society until his death on December 5, 1834. He is buried in Bunhill Fields, London. In those final years Pringle saw a half dozen of his poems published in George Thompson's Travels and Adventures (1827). One reader was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote Pringle that he believed his poem, "Afar in the Desert," was one of the "two or three most perfect lyric Poems" in English. Pringle brought out a second book of poems, Ephemerides, in 1828, and at last a major book, African Sketches (1834), which brought together his (often revised) poems and a narrative of his residence in South Africa.

• African Poems of Thomas Pringle, ed. Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman (Durban: University of Natal Press, 1989). PR 5190 P3A57 1989 Robarts Library
• Doyle, John Robert. Thomas Pringle (New York: Twayne, 1972). PR 5190 P3Z6 Robarts Library
• Marchand, Marion. Index to the Poems of Thomas Pringle 1789-1834 (School of Librarianship, University of Witwatersrand, 1960).
• Meiring, Jane. Thomas Pringle: His Life and Times. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1968. DT 844 .2 P7M3 Robarts Library
• Pringle, Thomas. African Sketches (London: Edward Moxon, 1834). 010097.e.63 British Library
• --. The Autumnal Excursion, or, Sketches in Teviotdale; with Other Poems (Edinburgh: Constable, 1819).
• --. Ephemerides, or, Occasional poems, written in Scotland and South Africa (London: Smith, Elder, 1828). Victoria University Rare Books no. 105
• --. Glen-Lynden: A Tale of Teviotdale (London: Smith, Elder, 1828).
• -- and Robert Story. The Institute: A Heroic Poem in Four Cantos (Edinburgh: W. McWilliam, 1811).
• Thomas Pringle: His Life, Times, and Poems, ed. William Hay (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1912). 11611.l.16 British Library