Alexander Pope’s witty and pointed poetic satire brought him infamy during his lifetime. It has also made critical evaluation of Pope in the years since his death more prone to interpretation based on the critic’s personal feelings about such satire than perhaps any other poet in history.

Pope was born the only child of Alexander and Edith Pope in 1688. The senior Pope, a linen-draper, had recently converted to Catholicism, and moved from London to Berkshire to avoid the anti-Catholic sentiment that ran rampant in London at the time.

His family’s Catholic faith kept young Alexander Pope from receiving a formal education, and thus Pope was mostly self-educated, teaching himself literature and languages, including Latin and Greek. Pope’s frail health also thwarted him; at twelve he both composed his earliest known work, “Ode to Solitude” and began suffering from a debilitating …

Edgar Allan Poe is, without a doubt, the most famous poet in the history of American literature. Well-known for both his poetry and his short fiction, Poe’s verses are among the best known in the English language, and have become an indelible part of American culture.

Born in 1809 in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe the son of professional actors, both of who died before he was three. The Allan family of Richmond, Virginia, took Poe in and raised him, sending him to boarding school and to the University of Virginia. Despite Poe’s excellent academic performance, he had to leave school when his foster father refused to pay gambling debts Poe had incurred.

His relationship with Allan in ruins, Poe joined the U.S. Army in 1827. He published two volumes of poems to little success and attempted to attend the …

Irish balladeer, singer, and poet Thomas Moore gained fame in the first half of the nineteenth century both as a poet and as a society figure whose scandalous behavior may have overshadowed his talents.

Thomas Moore was born in 1779 in Dublin, Ireland, over his father’s grocery business. Moore was one of the first Catholic students allowed entry to Trinity College in London, where he studied law.

Moore’s 1803 appointment to registrar of the Admiralty in Bermuda brought him success in London society. His travels in North America were the inspiration for his first book, and upon his return to England, he married an actress, Elizabeth Dyke. As a frequent guest to London’s society gatherings, Moore gained a reputation for his singing of ballads and recitations of poetry.

Although his writing and his position provided him a good income, …

Poet Robert Lowell’s turbulent journey in life is echoed in the more personal of his poetry.

Robert Lowell was born in 1917, the son of the famous Lowells of Boston, a family that already boasted two poets, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. He followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, but after two years – and upon the advice of his psychiatrist – transferred to Kenyon College.

At Kenyon, Lowell took up another family tradition – poetry. His studies under poet John Crowe Ransom inspired him, as did his graduate work at Louisiana State University, where his professors included Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Despite a myriad of personal troubles – manic depressive episodes that resulted in his institutionalization on several occasions, a conversion from the Episcopalian faith to Catholicism, political views that saw him imprisoned for conscientiously objecting to World War II …

Poet Amy Lowell’s literary reputation, marred in her lifetime due to her lifestyle and at times overbearing personality, has in recent years begun to improve as new generations of readers have rediscovered her work.

Born in 1874 in Brookline Massachusetts, Amy Lowell was the daughter of a prominent New England family, one that encouraged her love of reading and writing. She began writing poetry in 1902, inspired by seeing Eleonora Duse, one of the most beloved actresses of her generation, on stage.

Lowell’s relationship with another actress, Ada Russell, would be the most important of her adult life. Lowell and Russell met in 1909 and were lovers for the remainder of Lowell’s life. Russell became the subject of many of Lowell’s poems, poems that were often written in code to disguise Lowell’s homosexual feelings toward Russell. However, …