Idiosyncratic, utterly original poet e.e. cummings ushered in the modern era of poetry with his idiomatic, conversational verse that captured the beauty of human speech.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was sociology and political science professor at Harvard University, but left Harvard when Edward Estlin Cummings was a small child to become an ordained minister at a congregational church in Boston.

e.e. cummings attended Harvard, where he studied languages and began his fascination with poetry after being introduced to poet Ezra Pound. Upon graduation, cummings volunteered to serve in World War I with the Norton-Haries Ambulance Corps. cummings became close to another volunteer, William Slater Brown, and when Brown was arrested for sending seditious letters back home, cummings went along with him to the La Ferte Mace internment camp. Only the intervention of cummings’ father was enough to free the two. However, e.e. cummings was not free for long; he was drafted into service when America joined the Great War, and served until Armistice.

His wartime experiences were the inspiration for some of e.e. cummings’ first published writings. His book about the internment experience, The Enormous Room, was published only after persuasion from his father.

After the war, cummings married his first wife, Elaine Orr, and began to focus on his poetry and painting. He wrote a quick succession of books during the 1920s, amidst much tragedy; his marriage fell apart, and in 1926, his father was killed and his mother gravely injured in an automobile accident.

His father’s death proved as influential on cummings’ poetry as his wartime experiences. He threw himself into his poetry with renewed vigor, while also marrying and divorcing another wife, Anne Barton.

It was in 1932 that cummings met Marion Morehouse, who lived with him as a wife despite the fact that they were never formally married. He and Morehouse traveled the world, visiting Tunisia, Russia, Mexico, and France, all the while writing poetry. As World War II loomed, much of his poetry was anti-war.

In 1962, e.e. cummings died at the age of 68 from a cerebral hemorrhage. He left behind a body of work that encompassed more than 25 books of poetry, prose, plays, and drawings, and a reputation as one of America’s most celebrated modern poets.

Some of e.e. cummings’ poems include:

i thank you god

since feeling is first

in spite of everything

A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No mere pickpocket, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry often melded recollection and imagination into verse that both borrowed from nature and exploded its boundaries.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, in Devonshire, England, into a large family of fourteen children fathered by a vicar and schoolteacher. Coleridge was the youngest of this prodigious family.

Coleridge’s father died in 1781, after which the young Coleridge attended Christ’s Hospital School in London. He made many lasting friendships at Christ’s School, he most important of which was no doubt his relationship with Charles Lamb.

Coleridge followed his father’s desire that he be a member of the clergy, and continued his education at Jesus College of the University of Cambridge. However, Coleridge’s beliefs soon diverged from those of the Church of England; Coleridge, always prey to the influences of others, began to support and listen to Unitarian William Frend. Coleridge never earned a degree from the university.

A meeting with another poet, Robert Southey, would prove to be the most influential of Coleridge’s subsequent friendships. Southey and Coleridge planned to found a utopian-commune - pantisocracy - near the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, where learning and freedom would flourish. With the pantisocracy in mind, Southey and Coleridge married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker in 1795.

The pantisocracy never proved fruitful, and the marriage soon became a miserable one for Coleridge. He separated from his wife, and after meeting poet William Wordsworth, moved to a cottage in Somerset, where he began to write the poetry that he would become known for. Among those composed at the cottage include “The Rime of Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “The Nightingale.” “Kubla Khan” is nearly as famous for its origin as it is for its verse; Coleridge claimed to have composed the poem in an opium haze.

Coleridge’s relationship with Wordsworth proved to be an auspicious one; the poetic collaboration between the two, Lyrical Ballads, both contains most of the best poetry written by Coleridge, but also became famous as the first true work of Romantic poetry. The two traveled continental Europe together, studying and gathering fodder for their poetry.

After Coleridge returned to England, he spent most of the next few years writing and lecturing. An insidious addiction to opium that had at first inspired his poetry had begun to take precedence over Coleridge’s life, with even spending two years as the secretary to the governor of Malta in an attempt to distance himself from his addiction.

Despite his addiction, Coleridge continued to write until his death in 1834.

Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Kubla Khan

The Eolian Harp

Something Childish, But Very Natural

The whimsical world of Lewis Carroll may be best known through his novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but his poetry is infused with the same clever word play and imagination for which his novels are regarded.

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1832 in the parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, England. The third of eleven children of Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge, young Charles was the oldest boy.

A precocious student, young Charles applied himself especially well to mathematics, eventually winning the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. As Charles Dodgson, he wrote many books and articles about mathematics.

It was poetry, however, that Charles was drawn to even more than mathematics. He published his first poem, “Solitude” in 1856 under the pseudonym he would become famous for - “Lewis Carroll.” His arrival at his pseudonym belied the talent that Lewis Carroll would be known for; Lewis is an English version of the name Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, whereas Carroll is an English version of Carolus, Latin for Charles.

Lewis Carroll’s most renowned books - those featuring the character of Alice - had a most auspicious beginning. Carroll conceived the story of Alice’s adventures while entertaining the daughter of a friend, who just so happened to be named Alice. The rest is history. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have become classics.

Although not books of poetry, both books did feature poetry. From Through the Looking-Glass came “Jabberwocky,” one of Carroll’s most famous poems:

Jabberwocky

A silly play on words, “Jabberwocky” continues to delight children and adults alike.

Like his “Alice” books, many of Lewis Carroll’s poems were written for friends, including “Madrigal:”

Madrigal

(To Miss May Forshall.)

“Madrigal” has the same sense of irreverent humor that is integral to all of Lewis Carroll’s work.

Lewis Carroll’s final important work as writer was, in fact, a poem. “The Hunting of the Snark,” a book length poem much in the same vein as “Jabberwocky,” is a richly imaginative tale:

Excerpt from The Hunting of the Snark:

Despite the wealth and fame he gained as poet and author Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson the shy professor continued to teach mathematics at Christ Church until 1881, and stayed at the college until his death in 1898 at the age of 66. Both Dodgson and Carroll’s poetic and prose legacies live on - even today, Lewis Carroll is one of the most celebrated poets and authors in history.

As the foremost of the group of English poets who would come to be known as the Romantics, George Gordon Byron, later Lord Byron, became a symbol for the poet whose life was as decadent and fantastic as his poetry.
George Gordon Byron was born in 1788 to Captain John Byron and Catherine Gordon (John’s second wife). George Gordon Byron was born with a club-foot which resulted in lameness. The young Byron endured painful and useless treatments for the club-foot before being fitted for a corrective boot.

Byron’s early childhood was spent in Aberdeen, Scotland, in genteel poverty marked by the death of his father in 1791. However, young Byron’s fortunes changed considerably in 1708 when he inherited his great-uncle’s title, thus becoming George Gordon, Lord Byron. Along with the baronetcy came the estates and privileges, and Catherine Gordon took her son to England to enjoy them.

Byron spent his adolescent years in Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge. It was in Newstead, in 1802, that he likely met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Later, the two were suspected of incest.

In 1807, Byron’s first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness, was published to bad reviews. The clever Byron responded with his next volume, English Bards And Scotch Reviewers in 1808. The next year would be an eventful one; now 21, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords and embarked upon a grand tour that took him to Spain, Albania, Greece, and Malta.

In 1812, Byron found his first success as a poet upon the release of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. After this, his writing became required reading in English society - The Corsair, released in 1814, sold 10,000 copies on the first day of its release. His success made him the toast of London - his outlandish behavior made him a scandal. His open affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb (who would bestow upon Byron the immortal sobriquet “mad, bad and dangerous to know”) shocked his peers.

Lady Caroline was not Byron’s only scandalous lover; it was in 1813 that Byron was supposed to have had an incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh. During the summer of 1813 Byron apparently entered into a more than brotherly relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, who was a mother of three daughters. In 1814 Augusta gave birth to daughter Elizabeth Medora, and many assumed the child belong to Byron.

By 1816, Byron had been married - and divorced - and the father to a daughter, Ada. On the heels of his rumors swirling about his relationship with Augusta Leigh and his accumulation of gambling debts, Byron left Englad for Geneva, settling there with his mistress, Claire Clairmont and Percy Bysshe Shelley and wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Byron traveled on to Italy, where he spent two years writing. One of the pieces he completed while in Rome was his masterpiece, Don Juan. However, During his years in Italy, Byron wrote Lament Of Tasso, inspired by his visit in Tasso’s cell in Rome, Mazeppa and started Don Juan, his satiric masterpiece. While in Ravenna and Pisa, Byron became deeply interested in drama, and wrote among others The Two Foscari, Sardanapalaus, Cain, and the unfinished Heaven And Earth.

In 1823, Byron decided to aid the Greek effort to overthrow the Ottomans. Byron never made it to the battlefield; he contracted a fever and died in Missolonghia in April 1824. Memorials for George Gordon, Lord Byron, were held on many different soils before his body returned to England, only to refused interment by both Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s. Byron was ultimately buried in the family vault in Nottinghamshire.

Poems by Lord Byron:

She Walks in Beauty

So We’ll Go No More A-Roving

Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull

The Bard of Scotland, as he’s known, Robert Burns’ poetry, while undeniably associated with his Scottish homeland, has nonetheless become popular the world over.

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland in 1759, the first of seven children born to William and Agnes Burness. William Burness was a poor tenant farmer who educated his children at home and in an “adventure school” that he founded with John Murdock. When William Burness died penniless in 1784, young Robert and his brother Gilbert took over the family farm.

Robert Burns began writing poetry at the age of fifteen, inspired by his first love. Between 1784 and 1785, Burns began writing the poems that would make up his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which was printed by subscription in 1786. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was an immediate, unqualified success, gaining Burns recognition throughout the British Isles, where he became known as the “peasant-poet.” It was upon the publication of this book that Burns changed the spelling of his name.

While Burns dedicated himself to his poetry, he left plenty of time for other business - including fathering fourteen children by various women, only one of which was his wife. Burns’ biographer DeLancey Ferguson wrote amusingly that “it was not so much that [Burns] was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.” Burns was also a Freemason, and dedicated much time to the Lodge, which resulted in his being named the Poet Laureate of the Freemasons.

In 1788, Burns left the family farm and along with his wife, Jean Armour, settled in Ellisland, Scotland. He continued to write poetry, but also began collecting songs and poems native to Scotland for The Scots Musical Museum, a collection of volumes of Scottish songs. This work in collecting songs spilled over into Burns’ poetry; much of his poetry after this time were in Scots dialect, and documented Scottish traditions and culture.

Burns died in 1796 at the untimely age of 37. His youngest son, Maxwell, was born on the day of Burns’ burial. After his death, a memorial edition of his poems was published to raise money for the support of his wife and children, who were also forced to live off the donations of Burns’ fans after his death.

Robert Burns will be remembered not only for his poetry, but for his efforts to preserve his Scottish heritage. It is through his efforts that we sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve and compare love to the red rose.

Some of Burns’ best-known poems are:

To a Mouse

My Heart is in the Highlands

There’ll Never Be Peace Till Jamie Comes Home