Born November 4, 1771, James Montgomery was a Scots poet and hymnist who enjoyed popularity during his time and made a mark on British literature in the early to mid-1800s. He was born at Irvine in Ayrshire, where his father was a Moravian preacher, but left there when his father was relocated to Ireland by his church. Montgomery was no more than six at the time, but his later poetry included vivid images of his hometown and his early youth.

He was educated at the Moravian school at Fulneck from the time he was six until he was sixteen. Toward the end of his years at Fulneck, his parents were sent to the West Indies as missionaries, leaving him behind to finish his education. Though it had been hoped by his teachers and parents that the boy would become a minister, this didn’t suit him, and at 16, when he left the school, he was placed as an apprentice to a chandler. Unhappy with his first master, he ran off and took a place with a second, with whom he finished a year in service before setting off to make his own fortune.

Montgomery’s life in the world of writing began when his poetry was rejected by a publisher to whom he offered it. Instead, the man offered him a job as a clerk, where he spent eight months learning the ins and outs of the publishing business. When he returned to Yorkshire, he took a position with a bookseller who also published a newspaper in Sheffield. The bookseller, Mr. Gales, was forced to flee England when he displeased those in power, and left Montgomery the position of editor of the Sheffield Register. Montgomery promptly changed the name of the newspaper to the Sheffield Iris, and began the publication that was to land him at least twice in gaol, and support him through his middle years.

In 1795 and again in 1796, Montgomery was fined and imprisoned for ‘political offenses’ that arose from two very different circumstances. In the first case, he was commissioned to print a ballad for a ballad-monger. The poem was judged to be inflammatory, and both he and the seller were tried, fined and sentenced to time in prison. A year later, he published a piece in the Iris that was critical of the way that a riot in Sheffield was handled by a local magistrate. Again, he was tried and sentenced to time in prison. After his release, he continued to publish the Iris, which made him a comfortable living through his middle years.

Montgomery’s early attempts at verse were rejected, but in 1806 he published “The Wanderer of Switzerland” to poor reviews, though it was defended by none less than Lord Byron himself. That began a series of books and poems which attracted him notice, including “The West Indies”, “The World Before the Flood”, “The Pelican Island” and “Greenland”.

It is, however, his hymns for which Montgomery is best remembered. Says a contemporary in a short biography, “The tendency of all he wrote was to purify and elevate. The catholicity of his religious poems reflects the spirit of their author, who was singularly free from sectarian narrowness.” Those hymns are still sung “wherever the English language is spoken”.

Montgomery died in 1854 at the age of 83. The town of Sheffield accorded him the honor of a public funeral, and further honored him with a statue and a stained glass window in the Sheffield church.

One of the most well-known poets of the Tang dynasty, Wang Wei was born in 699 in Shenshi. His parents were both well-educated, and Wei followed in their footsteps, sitting for and passing the shin-shih at the age of 23. His success in those exams ensured him entry into the literary circles of the city. Wang was appointed the Assistant Secretary for Music, but soon found himself exiled to the Shantung provinces where he remained for several years. Upon his return to Chang-an, then the largest city in the Chinese world, he married and began to establish his own estates. Wang’s wife died when he was thirty, and he never remarried.

Wang spent much of his life in government service, both in Chang-an and in posts to outlying districts. In 750, he retired from service to paint and write. Captured by An Lushan rebels in 755, he was forced to collaborate, and when the Imperial dynasty returned to power, he was briefly imprisoned as a rebel. By 761, however, he had returned to government service, where he remained until his death in 766.

Wang Wei wrote over 400 poems during his life, many of which are widely anthologized. His poetry views the world with detached compassion, espousing Buddhist philosophy. His poems have been widely translated into English by many poets and writers, leading to a wide variety of translations of his work. He wrote almost exclusively in quatrains, many of which depict quiet scenes of water and mist. A versatile talent, Wang was also a painter, and his black and white landscapes of those same subjects are famed early examples of Southern landscape art.

Wang’s most well-known poetry is the Wang River Collection, which includes his poem Deer Park. His work has inspired other poets throughout the ages, including Ezra Pound, whose Cantos attempt to synthesize East and West and use an ideogrammic structure that the poet based on Wang Wei. The most well-known translations of his work were done in 1959 by Chang Yin-nan and L.C. Walmsley.

Born in 1923 to a prestigious Syrian family, Nizar Qabbani was to become one of the most loved and revered poets in the Arab world. Qabbani was a diplomat, poet and publisher whose work approached the sensitive subjects of eroticism, feminism, Arab nationalism, love and religion.

Qabbani (sometimes spelled as Kabbani), was born into a wealthy and well-known family in Damascus. His father owned a chocolate factory, but it was his political views and activities that influenced the young Qabbani. The elder Qabbani was imprisoned several times during Nizar’s childhood for his support of fighters in the resistance against the French mandate of Syria. Young Nizar adopted his father’s views as his own as he grew, and those views influenced both his life and his poetry. He was also influenced by his great uncle, Abu-Khalil Al-Qabbani, one of the writers whose work greatly changed the face of Arabic drama.

Qabbani’s first book of verse was published while he was still at the Syrian University (later to be called Damascus University) studying law. The book, Kalat Liya al-Samraa (The Dark Skinned Said to Me), shocked staid Damascus society with its open and provocative descriptions of women’s bodies and the lush sensuality of Qabbani’s writing. The shock was lessened a bit by the preface to the book, which was written by a friend of Qabbani’s father, Munir Al-Ajlani, the Minister Of Education for Syria.

Qabbani graduated in 1945 with a degree in law, and went to work for the Syrian Foreign Ministry. He continued to work at the Ministry until his resignation in 1966, a full twenty years. During his time with the Foreign Ministry, he served posts in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Madrid, London and China.

Married, twice, Qabbani had four children. He was no stranger to personal grief. His son from his first marriage, Tawfiq, died of a heart attack at the age of 17, and his second wife, Balqis, was killed in a bomb attack on the Iraqi embassy in Beirut in 1982. He expressed his grief over both deaths in poems which are among his best loved.

But there was an older grief that influenced Qabbani’s poetry, and his life. When he was still in his teens, his seventeen year old sister committed suicide rather than marry the man who had been chosen for her. His grief over her death marked him, and much of his poetry speaks of the imprisonment that Arab society imposes on its women. Many of his political poems about Syria liken the country’s imprisonment by France to the situation of Arab women.

Qabbani opened his own publishing house in London in the early 1960s, and it rapidly became a powerful voice of lament for Arab causes. His poetry was published not only in books, but in the newspapers, and is heard in the lyrics of popular songs. When he died in 1998 at the age of 75, the New York Times obituary was headlined Nizar Qabbani, Sensual Arab Poet, Dies at 75. It quoted the Syrian poet, Youssef Karkoutly, who said of Qabbani, “His poetry was as necessary to our lives as air.”

The quintessential cowboy poet, Bruce Kiskaddon, was born in 1878 in Pennsylvania, but began his cowboy life in 1898 in the Picket Wire district of Colorado. He is widely acknowledged to be the cowboy poet laureate, and his poetry appeared widely in calendars and publications during his life. There has been renewed interest in his work since the mid-1980s, with the birth of the Cowboy Poetry Renaissance.

In his own words, Bruce Kiskaddon started riding in Colorado, and “since that time, I have put in ten or twelve years around horse and cow outfits.” He often amused his fellow cowboys by writing parodies of songs and putting into rhyme the happenings around the ranch and on the trail.

Kiskaddon joined the Army and served in World War I. Following the war, he remained overseas, spending some time in Australia as a “jackaroo” on ranches there. When he returned to the U.S., he went to work for Tap Duncan, a well-known and successful cattle rancher. He continued to amuse his fellow cowboys with his amusing rewriting of popular songs, and in 1922, his employer encouraged him to try writing “Western verse”, “just what really happens”. With his encouragement, Kiskaddon began writing poetry, and it proved popular not only among the cowboys, but with a more general audience.

His poems were published on calendars from the Los Angeles Union Stock Yards for years, and his stories in the Western Livestock Journal. He published his first book of poetry in 1924, and subsequent books in 1928, 1935 and 1947. Many of them have been republished since 1989 in several volumes of poetry, and in a book, Shorty’s Yarns.

In 1926, Kiskaddon left his cowboy life for the allure of the silver screen. He and several friends traveled to Hollywood to audition for a job as an extra, driving chariots in the movie Ben Hur. He remained in Hollywood the rest of his life, occasionally working as an extra or taking bit parts, but mainly supporting himself as a bellhop in Hollywood hotels. He continued to write, though, publishing his poetry and reminisces of life on the range in Western Livestock Journal, and in collections of poetry.

Kiskaddon died in 1950, before seeing the revival of cowboy poetry as a folk art, but his books and his legacy of hundreds of cowboy poems lives on.

Mary Gilmore, born Mary Jean Cameron on August 16, 1865, is one of Australia’s best known and most loved poets. From the first publication of her work in 1910 till her death in 1962, her poetry was widely published and much-loved, despite the opinions of critics who felt that much of it was ‘doggerel and propaganda’. So well-known is she that her face appears on the Australian $10 note, along with the text of one of her poems.

Gilmore grew up as the daughter of an itinerant worker, a carpenter who moved frequently during the first ten years of her life. Her education was necessarily fragmented due to the frequent moves, and it wasn’t till the family settled permanently in a home built by the poet’s father when she was about ten, that she finally attended a school with any regularity. At age 14, she began working as an assistant in her uncle’s school at Yerong Creek, then accepted a position with the Wagga Wagga Public Schools when she completed her teacher’s examination in 1882 at the age of seventeen. Gilmore worked in the public school system well into the 1890s, and began writing poetry as a teacher at Silverton, a mining community. It was while she was there that she developed the socialist views that were to mark her writing throughout her life.

By 1890, the young Mary Cameron was living in Sydney and her writing was frequently published in the Bulletin by editor A.G. Stephens. Her fiery verses established her as a radical poet and champion of the oppressed. In 1896, she emigrated to Paraguay as part of an experimental commune. It was there that she met and married William Gilmore. When the socialist commune failed, she and her husband returned to Australia and settled on a farm in Casterton.

In 1908, Gilmore became the women’s editor of The Worker, published by Australia’s largest and most influential trade union. For the next 20 years, she wrote about women’s rights, children’s welfare and the rights of the worker, firmly establishing herself as one of the foremost writers of the workers’ movement. Her first volume of poetry was published in 1910, and immediately made her one of Australia’s most popular poets. She left the Bulletin in 1931, moving on to other avenues of writing when her politics became to radical for the Australian Workers’ Union, including a regular column for the Tribune, the Communist party’s newspaper.

In 1937, she was accorded an imperial honor and became Dame Mary Gilmore. Her patriotic verse was widely read and quoted during World War II, and it is one of those poems, No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest, that is part of the copy protection on the $10 bill. Her works include six volumes of verse and three of prose, and literally hundreds of newspaper columns and other journalistic writings. Gilmore died in 1962 at the age of 97 and was accorded a state funeral.