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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Born into a servant family in Limousin in Provence at the Castle Ventadorn, Bernard is said to have grown handsome and quick-witted, and to have captured the eye of the lady of the house. He fell in love with her – and she with him – and wrote poems and songs extolling her beauty and grace and his feelings for her. When her husband, Bernard’s patron Count Eble, realized who it was that Bernard was writing for, Bernard was driven from the castle and made his way to Provence, where he eventually became enamored of Alienor d’Aquitaine, the Eleanor who crossed the Channel to marry Henry Plantagenet, Henry II of England.

His poetry celebrated nature and love, and concerned itself often with the unrequited love of a poor young man for one of the fine noble ladies from whom he was separated by society and notions of class. Bernard concerned himself with the art of poetry as much as with the sincerity of his emotions, making him one of the true masters of the troubadour’s art. His work is characterized by its use of traditional themes – the cruelty of a beautiful woman, the pains of love – that were made famous by the French troubadours of the twelfth century. It has a melancholy tone, and makes use of subtle imagery and symbolism to describe the plight of a poor man in love with a woman far above his station.

Bernard de Ventadorn wrote lyric poetry in oc, a medieval Provencal language that has been compared to modern Esperanto. The simple melodies and intricately beautiful lyrics were traditional expressions of ‘courtly love’, celebrating romantic devotion to a sexually unattainable woman, usually the wife of another man. Over the centuries, those works have been further romanticized and imbued with mystical significance, suggested as metaphors for political and religious dialogues and analyzed as commentary on the daily lives of the nobility of those ages.

It is said that when Eleanor of Aquitaine left Provence for England, Ventadorn remained behind, so heartbroken that he abandoned poetry and joined the order of Dalon, where he remained until his death.

During those years, Vladimir attended the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Although the lectures bored him, Vladimirovich continued to write poetry. There he also met his first patron, a man who would be a lifelong friend, David Burliuk. According to the stories, Burliuk heard Vladimirovich’s poetry, and promptly offered to pay him 50 kopeks a day so that he could continue to write without starving. By 1912, Vladimirovich was appearing regularly with the group of poets that included Burliuk. The poets read on street corners in “outlandish garb”, deliberately making their performances a nuisance to the established academia. By 1914, his first play was published and performed, and his activities led to his expulsion from the Moscow Institute.

In 1915, Vladimir published his first long poem, Cloud in the Trousers. It was also that year that he met Lili Birk, wife of Osip Birk, and the woman who would be the love of his life. His relationship with her was to last until 1928 and to greatly influence both his poetry and his life. Lilya’s husband, Osip, was to become Vladimirovich’s publisher and collaborator, apparently having no objection to the affair between his wife and the poet.

Vladimirovich’s popularity waxed with the Bolshevik Revolution. His slogans and posters fueled the revolutionaries and celebrated their victories. In the years following the revolution, the poet was one of the few who was freely allowed to travel in and out of the country. In 1922, he traveled to Latvia, Berlin and Paris, and met with Cocteau, Picasso, Braque and Lecter. His reputation as a poet and playwright continued to grow, and in 1923, began publishing Lef, a leftist literary journal. It featured the works of writers like Pasternak, Kamensky, Eisenstein and Brik.

In 1925, Vladimirov visited the United States, stopping first in Cuba and in Mexico. He spent several months touring the U.S. and giving lectures, readings and offering support to the struggle of the workers to unionize. His experiences in the U.S. were the basis for his book Stikki of Ameriki, or Poems of America. His poetry was increasingly propagandized, created for a mass audience. For years, he remained a darling of the Soviet Union, but his criticism of poets and writers outside the Revolution earned him criticism as a literary hack and talentless writer.

Toward the end of the decade, Vladimir began to find himself alienated from the Party line. His poetry and productions became critical of the New Order, and at least one debuted to critical and popular failure. At about the same time, he had become estranged from his precious Lili, and fallen in love with a Russian refugee, Tatiana Yakovleva. She refused his proposal, plunging him into a depression. The combination of his multiple estrangements – from writing, from the government, from love – proved too much, and in late April of 1930, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky took his own life.

Towne attended City College in New York, leaving after only a year to take a position as editorial assistant at Cosmopolitan magazine. From there, he moved to take a position with a new publication, Smart Set, when it debuted in 1901. The new magazine was aimed at the upscale, sophisticated New Yorker, and it reflected the image of Charles Towne himself. By 1904, he was its editor, and remained there until 1907, when he took a position as editor of Delineator, another glossy, urbanite magazine. He went on to edit numerous other popular magazines throughout is career, including McClure’s, Designer, and Harper’s Bazaar.

In addition to editing, Towne was also a prolific writer who did not confine himself to any one genre. He authored books of verse, plays, song cycles, literary columns, essays, memoirs, travel essays, lyrics for musicals and operettas – even a book of etiquette. Towne was a well-known face about town, and highly regarded by many as the essence of the successful urbanite, the essential New Yorker. Many of his poems have been widely reprinted, and his columns from New York American were often quoted. He shared his experience with students as a teacher of poetry at Columbia University where his students included author J.D. Salinger. In 1940, Towne joined the company of the Broadway hit, Life with Father. His autobiography, published in 1945, was entitled So Far, So Good.

Towne died in 1949, leaving behind a legacy of simple, direct poems and an enormous body of work that is still appreciated today.

From the start, Aiken devoted himself to writing, having a small private income with which to support himself. After a brief stint as a reporter, he focused on writing fiction, criticism and poetry. His first book of verse, Earth Triumphant, appeared in 1914, just two years after his graduation. By that time, he had been married for two years to Jessie MacDonald. The three children of that marriage, John Aiken, Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge, all went on to become published authors in their own rights. Aiken married twice more, to Clarissa M. Lorenz in 1930, and to Mary Hoover in 1937.

During his adult years, Aiken traveled extensively, never settling in one place for very long. He alternated often between living in England and returning to the United States. He lived in Boston and New York, and in Rye and London, England. While in Rye, he wrote a column, “London Letters”, for the New Yorker.

In 1930, Aiken received a Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems. From 1950 to 1952, he served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, the precursor to the current Poet Laureate position. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize, Aiken was also awarded a National Book Award, the Bolinger Prize, a Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Medal for Literature. Despite the honors that were heaped on his works of both poetry and fiction, Aiken never enjoyed the popularity of writers like T.S. Eliot. That was partly due to his own shyness and reluctance to give public performances of his work, and partly due to his frequent moves between Britain and the U.S. which made it difficult to classify his work as American or English.

Aiken’s strongest reputation may have been as a critic of poetry. His harsh, truthful critiques likely didn’t make him many friends among other poets, but they are still regarded as brilliant.

Aiken died in 1973 and is buried in Savannah, Georgia. Most fitting to his wry sense of humor, his tombstone is a bench, inscribed with the words, “Give my love to the world”. According to local legend, the bench was Aiken’s request, so that people might be inclined to sit on his tomb and enjoy a martini or glass of Madeira.

Less than two years later, Machado’s first book, Soledades, was published. He continued to modify the book over the next few years, adding and subtracting poems, and editing them till he was satisfied with it. In 1907, he published another edition – the definitive version, Soledades, galerías y otros poemas.

In 1907, along with the publication of his definitive collection of poetry, Machado hit several more milestones in his life. He took a position as a professor of French at the school in Soria. There, he met Leonor Izquierdo, who was to become his wife in 1909. At the time of their marriage, he was 31, and she 15. Their happiness was to be short-lived, though. In 1911, the couple moved to Paris, where Leonor was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. The Machados returned to Soria, where Leonor died in 1912 after a battle with the illness. Her death on August 1 came just a few weeks after the publication of Machado’s latest book, Campos de Castilla. Devastated by his young bride’s death, Machado left Soria for Andalucía, where he wrote a series of poems dealing with Leonor’s death. These were eventually added to Campos de Castilla, completing it. It was republished in 1916, along with a new work, Nuevas Canciones.

In 1919, he left Andalucía to take a position as Professor of French at Segovia. There, he and his brother worked together on a series of plays that brought both fame and popularity. By this time, they were already considered part of the literary group of writers, poets and playwrights known as the Generation of 98, a group largely credited with bringing Spanish literature back into prominence after centuries of relative obscurity.

When Franco launched his coup in 1936, Machado was in Madrid. His brother, Manuel, was trapped in the Nationalist Zone. The pair were not to ever meet again. As the war progressed, Machado was evacuated, first from Madrid to Valencia, then to Barcelona, and finally, to Colliore, over the border in France. It was there that he died, in February of 1939, just a few days before his mother, and is buried.