Among the most romantic figures of the medieval era were the French troubadours, poets who wrote of romantic love in delicate and beautiful verse that survives to this day. Perhaps the most famous of the troubadours was Bernard de Ventador, also known as Bernard de Ventadorn, the son of a Boulanger – a servant whose job it was to heat the ovens in the castle to bake bread and a house servant. This was the history attributed to Ventadorn by the vidas, biographical histories of the troubadours, but at least one contemporary slyly hinted that Bernard was actually the son of the Count d’Eble, the Monseignur of Ventadorn. It’s difficult to separate fact from legend after eight centuries, and what can be found about Ventadorn in contemporary research is often as lyrical and flowery as the man’s poetry.

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.

More commonly known as Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich was one of the foremost poets of the Russian revolution. Born in 1893 in Bagdadi, Georgia, he was of Russian, Cossack and Ukrainian descent. His childhood was marred by the death of his father in 1906, when the boy was thirteen years old. Vladimirovich attended the gymnasium at Kutai, and later a school in Moscow. In 1908, at the age of 15, he joined the Moscow committee of the Russian Socialist Democratic Party. His activity with the Party led to his arrest for subversive activity in 1909, and he was imprisoned for six months. It was during his imprisonment that Vladimirovich began to write poetry. After his release, he joined the Russian Futurist group, a group of artists and intellectuals who sought to free the arts from academic traditions.

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.

Born in 1877, Charles Hanson Towne enjoyed a long career as a poet, author, editor and general celebrity. That career began early, when 11 year old Towne created and published a magazine for himself and his friends, Unique Monthly, of which twelve issues still exist and are held in a special collection at the New York Public Library. From this early start, publishing and editing was to become a lifelong love. There’s little written about his childhood, other than the fact that he moved with his family from Kentucky to New York when he was just three years old. He spent nearly all his life there, and is considered by many to be the quintessential New Yorker.

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.

Conrad Potter Aiken was born August 5, 1889 in Savannah, Georgia. His early childhood years were marked with trauma of the worst kind. His father killed his mother and then committed suicide over financial problems. Aiken may have witnessed the killings, or found the bodies. Either way, the incident marked him indelibly. After their deaths, he was raised by his great-great aunt in Massachusetts. He was educated at private schools and attended Harvard University, where he edited the Advocate with T.S. Eliot. He graduated from Harvard in 1912, at the age of 22.

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.

Born in 1875, Antonio Machado was to become one of the premier Spanish poets of his generation. In 1883, his family moved from Seville to Madrid, and Machado and his brother Manuel were enrolled in the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. He completed his Bachillerato in Madrid, and in 1889, he and Manuel traveled to Paris to take positions as translators for a French publisher. There, his encounters with such famous poets as Verlaine, Oscar Wilde and Paul Fort encouraged a love of poetry. By 1901, that love began to bear fruit. His first poems were published in the literary journal, Electra.

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.