Percy French was born William Percy French on May 1, 1854. He was one of the most popular and well-known Irish singers and songwriters of his time. He grew up and attended school in County Roscommon, graduating from Trinity College in Dublin in 1881 with a degree in civil engineering. But he also discovered a love for writing while at Trinity, and wrote his first successful song while a student there. He sold that song, Abdul Abulbul Amir, to a publisher for £5 and never saw another cent for it, even when it became very popular. In fact, a number of other authors stepped forward and claimed to have written it.

French took a job as a drain inspector for County Cavan upon his graduation. He held that position till 1885, and it was during those years that he wrote his best work. He also took up watercolor painting, and his paintings from that period are generally regarded as outstanding works of the art. One sold at auction recently for the astonishing sum of £44,000.

When that job ended rather abruptly in 1885, French relocated to Dublin where he took a position as editor of a weekly comic magazine. He also began promoting his comic songs and writings in a series of concerts by The Jarvey Concert Company. When the magazine folded, he turned to the stage full time and began his career as a songwriter and performer in earnest.

Those years were marred by the tragic death of his young wife, Ettie, who died in childbirth in 1891 after the couple had been married only a year. The tragedy was complete when his infant daughter also died a few days later. Many believe it was those deaths that lent a poignancy to his writing that can be seen in such poems as “Gortnamona” and “Not Lost But Gone Before”.

In 1894, French married again, this time to Helen Sheldon. The couple had three children, all girls – Ettie, Bonnie and Joan. Through their early childhood, French’s reputation as a singer and writer of comic songs grew until he was one of the most highly regarded performers by the turn of the century. Though he was based in London by this time, he and his collaborator, Dr. W. H. Collisson toured the United States, Canada and the West Indies, where they were a great success. In 1920, while touring in Glasgow, Scotland, he was taken ill and some days later succumbed to the illness in Lancashire, where he is buried.

Born of Scottish parents in New Zealand, Jessie Mackay became the first native born New Zealand poet to achieve national prominence. Her empathy and relationship to those who had lost their lands made her voice one that spoke for all the peoples of New Zealand, bringing her popularity even at a young age.

Jessie Mackay was born in 1864 at Rakaia Gorge. She was schooled at home, but went to Christchurch at the age of fourteen to attend Christchurch Training College. She taught at Kakahu Bush School from 1887 to 1890, but was forced to leave the position because of illness. Over the next fifteen years, she returned again and again to teaching, taking positions at Ashwick Flat and Inveresk School. Eventually, ill health forced her to give up teaching, and she turned her attention to her other love – journalism and writing.

Mackay wrote a biweekly column for the Otago Witness beginning in 1898, and she continued to write for the Witness for the next 30 years. Her first book of poetry had been published in 1889, when Mackay was only twenty five years old. In the preface to that book she wrote that she hoped for “a dawning of the national spirit” in New Zealand, a hope that was to color all of her work throughout her life. Her second volume of poetry, The Sitter on the Rail was published in 1891, and contained satirical and humorous poetry with a decidedly political slant.

Mackay openly espoused political causes, including feminism and the rights of indigenous peoples. Her 1908 book, From the Maori Sea and its immediate successor, Land of the Morning, are generally believed to contain her very best work. In 1917, she took a house with her sister Georgina where she remained for the rest of her life. Her nationalist spirit and her fierce dedication to the causes that she held important in her life fueled her writing, and in 1926, she published the book Bride of the Rivers, another book of verse, and another in 1935, Vigils.

Mackay is more widely known now as a pioneering spirit, a humanitarian who lived the life in which she believed. Her poetry is often seen as containing archaic constructs, and her ballads often revolve around strong feminine heroines. Jessie Mackay died at Christchurch in 1938, and the PEN society established the Jessie Mackay Memorial Award for Verse in her name.

William Shenstone, an English poet of the 18th century, is perhaps best known for a poem that he wrote in imitation of Spenser’s Faerie Queen. That’s only one of the odd little footnotes that mark the life of the poet, who was born in 1714 in a small village in Worcestershire in England. His early education is traced, in part because of his poem The Schoolmistress, and there are those who believe that the subject of his poem is Sarah Lloyd, the schoolmistress of his childhood school. In 1732, he attended Pembroke College at Oxford, but did not graduate.

It was at Oxford, though, that he published his first book of verse, titled appropriately Poems on various occasions, written for the entertainment of the author. The book was never intended for public consumption, but became rather popular when his poem The Schoolmistress was published. In fact, Shenstone tried very hard to suppress the circulation of his first volume of poetry. In 1742, he gave in to the inevitable and published a revised version of The Schoolmistress, In Imitation of Spenser.

Interestingly, Shenstone achieved his greatest fame not as a poet, but as a landscape gardener. In 1745, he inherited Leasowes Estate, where he was born, and devoted most of the rest of his life to beautifying its gardens and grounds. In this, he was so successful that he became a local celebrity. In the meantime, he continued to battle with those who insisted on taking The Schoolmistress as a seriously meant piece of poetry. It was meant, he claimed from the start, as satire, and his biting remarks in a letter to a friend about critics who cannot see satire for what it is are peculiarly on the mark:

If it strikes any, it must be merely people of taste; for people of wit without taste, which comprehends the larger part of the critical tribe, will unavoidably despise it… You cannot conceive how large the number is of those that mistake burlesque for the very foolishness it exposes;

For all his complaints about critics of his works misunderstanding his intent, Shenstone also attracted high critical praise from a number of noteworthy names. In particular, Robert Burns referred to him as that celebrated poet whose divine elegies do honor to our language, our nation, and our species.

Among the curious footnotes to Shenstone’s life is the fact that he is known as the first person to use the word floccinaucinihilipilification in writing. It is often cited as the longest word in the English language, as stated in the Oxford English Dictionary. It contains one letter more than the more well-known antidisestablishmentarianism.

Shenstone died February 11, 1763. One of the five Houses at Solihull School, which he attended as a student, is named for him.

Atom Yarjanian is the personification of the poet as hero, who speaks the truth as he sees it and is persecuted for his vision. Born in 1878 in Akn, Western Armenia, Yarjanian grew up in the shadow of the persecution of his native people. His family was upper middle class, which allowed him to attend the finer schools, including the Nersesian Institute, where he first developed his interest in poetry. That interest was encouraged by the school’s headmaster, who gave him the nickname that he would later take as his pen name, Siamanto.

In 1891, his family moved to Istanbul (Constantinople), where he attended the Berberian Institute. He graduated in 1896 at the age of 18, a year that was marked in blood for the Armenian people. On August 26, a group of Armenian dissidents raided the headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. They killed the guards and took 140 bank employees hostage in an attempt to highlight the plight of their people and demand the rights that were promised the Armenian people years earlier. In response, Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered a bloody pogrom that is estimated to have killed between 80,000 and 300,000 Armenians. Yarjanian and his family fled Constantinople along with many other Armenian intellectuals to escape the butchery.

The escape did little to lighten his mind, though, and during his years in exile, his writing celebrated his people and mourned their fate at the hands of the Ottomans. He attended the Sorbonne in Paris, working various odd jobs to support himself, and developed ties to other well-known Armenian personalities both in and out of France.

He eventually left Paris for Geneva, to join the staff of The Flag, an Armenian newspaper published outside Armenia where it could freely criticize the Ottoman Empire and focus international attention on the plight of the Armenian people. His first published poems were printed in The Flag under the pen name of Siamanto. His poetry was always highly nationalistic, and called for a free Armenia with no persecution.

Between 1904 and 1909, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, living in Zurich, Paris, Geneva and other cities. His published works included Heroically, Armenian Children, Torches of Spiritual Behavior and Hope, and My Friend’s Bloody News, all volumes of poetry that reflected the spirit of a people under the heel of bloody oppression, celebrating their heroism while mourning the deaths and pain in which they lived their daily lives.

In 1908, Yarjanian returned to Constantinople along with many of his fellow expatriates, hoping that the change in government in the Ottoman Empire meant that things were truly changing for his people. Instead, the continued persecutions again forced him to flee his beloved home for his own safety. He moved to the United States in 1910, where he immediately join the staff of the Homeland, an Armenian newspaper published in the US. He never lost his longing to return to his homeland, however, and in 1913, he returned, not to Constantinople, but to Tbilisi.

On April 24, 1915, Atom Yarjanian was among the nearly 250 Armenian intellectuals who were arrested in a swift move meant to cripple the spirit of the Armenian people. Siamanto, the heroic voice of the Armenian people in exile, was detained until August, when he was executed.

Vyacheslav Ivanovich is one of the most well-known poets associated with the Russian Symbolism movement. While he is best known for his poetic works, Ivanovich was also a playwright, a philosopher, an essayist and a critic. His work embodies much of what made Symbolism popular, and his writings about Symbolism were collected in the 1936 book, Simbolismo.

Ivanovich was born February 16, 1866 in Moscow. He graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a Gold Medal, and went on to attend Moscow University. In 1886, he moved to Berlin to study under Theodor Mommsen, who is generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century, and who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. Ivanovich studied with Mommsen until 1891, when he began traveling abroad, mostly in Italy, but also throughout Europe. It was during this time that he met Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, and eventually married her in 1898 after divorcing his first wife.

During the years following Ivanovich’s years in Berlin, he and Lydia traveled extensively, moving from Athens to Geneva, and making pilgrimages to Egypt, Palestine, Lombardy and Italy. His first book of poetry, Lodestars, was published in 1903, but contained poetry that had been written over the previous decade. It immediately cemented his place among the Russian Symbolists, and invited comparisons with Milton and Trediakovsky. By the time he returned to St. Petersburg in 1905, his reputation as a poet, writer and critic was well-established. Ivanovich and Lydia took up housekeeping in a turreted house that became the most popular salon of the era, hosting poets, writers, philosophers, artists and dramatists.

This idyllic time was not to last, however. In 1907, Lydia died. Most critics feel that his poetry declined from that time on, losing its grandeur and taking on the trappings of theosophy and mysticism. In 1910, Ivanovich married his stepdaughter, claiming that his beloved Lydia had ordered him to do so in a vision. Their son Dimitry was born in 1912. Ivanovich continued to write, and published a series of articles on the Symbolists, which were released in 1936 as a collection. Ivanovich moved away from poetry after their publication, turning instead to translations of Sappho, Alcaeus, Eschylus and Petrarch.

When the new Communist regime took power, Ivanovich was not allowed to leave Russia until 1924 when he was allowed to lecture in Azerbijan. From there, he traveled to Italy, and settled in Rome, where he remained until his death in 1949. It was in Rome that he began to write poetry again, publishing Roman Sonnets in 1924 and Roman Diary in 1944. Many other poems by Ivanovich were published posthumously.