Pope was born the only child of Alexander and Edith Pope in 1688. The senior Pope, a linen-draper, had recently converted to Catholicism, and moved from London to Berkshire to avoid the anti-Catholic sentiment that ran rampant in London at the time.

His family’s Catholic faith kept young Alexander Pope from receiving a formal education, and thus Pope was mostly self-educated, teaching himself literature and languages, including Latin and Greek. Pope’s frail health also thwarted him; at twelve he both composed his earliest known work, “Ode to Solitude” and began suffering from a debilitating bone disease that stunted his growth, made him hunchbacked, and affected his health in general for the rest of his life.

In 1712, Pope published his most famous poem, “The Rape of the Lock,” which made him one of England’s most famous poets. Based on a true incident – a family feud that resulted from a stolen lock of hair – the poem’s hilarious satire won fans throughout the country.

Pope also turned his pen toward translation, beginning an epic translation of The Iliad that he wisely sold by subscription, enabling him income enough to support himself solely by writing.

Throughout his career, Pope’s satirical works, pointed toward other authors, critics, and the general public, often brought him both fame and notoriety, but never more so than upon the publication of Dunciad, a four-volume satire that mocked and lampooned critics and scholars, many well-known, of the day. Pope’s anonymous publication of the book did nothing to dissuade popular opinion that he was the author, and reaction was so hostile from both the targets of the satire and their friends that Pope would not leave home without his pistols.

Pope’s health began a further decline around 1738, and he began to write and publish less. One of his final finished projects was a revised Dunciad, no doubt to the delight of friends and enemies alike. He died at his home in Twickenham in 1744.

Pope’s critical reputation has been surrounded in controversy that did not die down with his death. Spurned by the Romantics during the Victorian period, embraced again in the 20th Century, Alexander Pope is a galvanizing poet whose work may be contentious, but is never less than fascinating – and clever.

Works by Alexander Pope:

From “The Rape of the Lock:”

From The Dunciad

Born in 1809 in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe the son of professional actors, both of who died before he was three. The Allan family of Richmond, Virginia, took Poe in and raised him, sending him to boarding school and to the University of Virginia. Despite Poe’s excellent academic performance, he had to leave school when his foster father refused to pay gambling debts Poe had incurred.

His relationship with Allan in ruins, Poe joined the U.S. Army in 1827. He published two volumes of poems to little success and attempted to attend the U.S. Military Academy, but was unable to afford schooling. He relocated to Balitmore, where he lived with an aunt.

Poe found success selling short stories, and in 1835 took over as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. His aunt and young cousin, Virginia Clemm, relocated to Richmond with Poe, and Poe and Virginia – only a teenager – were married in 1836.

Poe spent the next ten years writing short stories and poetry, in addition to holding editorial positions on several journals. It was during this period that Poe wrote and published many of his best short stories and poems, including some of his best-known stories and poems including “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

After his wife’s death in 1847, Poe struggled with depression and with alcoholism, both of which had troubled him for years. Although he continued writing, he often lived in dire poverty, his health nearly destroyed by alcoholism. In 1849, Poe was found in semi-conscious in Baltimore; he died four days later.

Edgar Allan Poe has been credited with inventing both the horror and detective genres of fiction with his short stories. His poetry, sometimes classified as “romantic” has nevertheless proved to be both timeless and surprisingly modern, appealing as much – or more – to today’s audiences as it did to his nineteenth century readers. Both his poetry and short fiction are part of the curriculum for students at all levels of study, from elementary school to graduate courses. Many of his stories and poems have been adapted for plays, movies, and television programs, making his work among the best known of any poet or author in history.

Some of Poe’s best-known poems include:

Annabel Lee

A Dream Within a Dream

The Raven

Thomas Moore was born in 1779 in Dublin, Ireland, over his father’s grocery business. Moore was one of the first Catholic students allowed entry to Trinity College in London, where he studied law.

Moore’s 1803 appointment to registrar of the Admiralty in Bermuda brought him success in London society. His travels in North America were the inspiration for his first book, and upon his return to England, he married an actress, Elizabeth Dyke. As a frequent guest to London’s society gatherings, Moore gained a reputation for his singing of ballads and recitations of poetry.

Although his writing and his position provided him a good income, Moore’s attempts to live the same lifestyle as his aristocratic friends resulted in his incurring excessive debts. An accusation of embezzlement in his appointment forced him to leave England in 1819. While in Paris, he became friends with George Gordon, Lord Byron, and became Byron’s literary executor upon the poet’s death. Moore’s decision, along with Byron’s family, to destroy the infamous poet’s explicit memoirs, later did damage to Moore’s own literary reputation.

Moore returned to England after his debts were repaid, settling in Wiltshire. His poetry continued to be successful, and Moore also worked as a novelist, biographer, and translator of poetry. He published frequently, both in his own books and in the journals of the day. His reputation grew immensely upon the publication of his collection of Irish ballads, Moore’s Irish Melodies (commonly known as Moore’s Melodies) in 1846 and 1852. It is this collection that brought him renown throughout England as the Irish Bard.

However, Moore’s life after his return was one of tragedy; all five of his children died young, and Moore himself suffered a stroke which left him unable to perform, a talent that had brought him fame throughout England. Moore died in 1852, at the height of his literary fame. Although Moore spent most of his working years abroad, he is considered Ireland’s bard.

Despite his wide-ranging works, Thomas Moore is known to modern audiences primarily as an Irish balladeer. His best-known works are in the ballad genre, and include ballads that are known today as Irish standards.

Some of Moore’s works include:

Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms

The Last Rose of Summer

They Know Not My Heart

Robert Lowell was born in 1917, the son of the famous Lowells of Boston, a family that already boasted two poets, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. He followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, but after two years – and upon the advice of his psychiatrist – transferred to Kenyon College.

At Kenyon, Lowell took up another family tradition – poetry. His studies under poet John Crowe Ransom inspired him, as did his graduate work at Louisiana State University, where his professors included Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Despite a myriad of personal troubles – manic depressive episodes that resulted in his institutionalization on several occasions, a conversion from the Episcopalian faith to Catholicism, political views that saw him imprisoned for conscientiously objecting to World War II – Lowell wrote accomplished, elegant poetry, and for his efforts was rewarded the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 30 for Lord Weary’s Castle.

Encouraged by psychiatrists to write about personal experiences as therapy, and inspired by the burgeoning Beat movement of the 1950s, Lowell began to abandon the formal, impersonal poetry he’d been known for. From the 1950s onward, Lowell’s poetry was more inward and personal, and as a result, stronger; his poetry collection Life Studies, released in 1959, would come to be known as The Waste Land of its day, a collection that changed the face of modern American poetry. Life Studies received the National Book Award in 1960, and its influence spread, leading to a new genre of American poetry named “confessional” by M.L. Rosenthal.

Life Studies cemented Lowell’s reputation as a poet, and during the 1960s, he began to parlay his newfound celebrity into a platform for his political views, publicly refusing an invitation to the Johnson White House as a statement against the Vietnam War, and participating on the March on the Pentagon in 1967.

Concentrating on plays nearly as much as poems throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Lowell returned to poetry in the mid 1970s. He won another Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for the collection of poems The Dolphin, and served as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1962 until 1977 when he died of a sudden heart attack in a New York taxi at the age of 60.

Poems by Robert Lowell:

Dolphin

Man and Wife

The Withdrawl

Born in 1874 in Brookline Massachusetts, Amy Lowell was the daughter of a prominent New England family, one that encouraged her love of reading and writing. She began writing poetry in 1902, inspired by seeing Eleonora Duse, one of the most beloved actresses of her generation, on stage.

Lowell’s relationship with another actress, Ada Russell, would be the most important of her adult life. Lowell and Russell met in 1909 and were lovers for the remainder of Lowell’s life. Russell became the subject of many of Lowell’s poems, poems that were often written in code to disguise Lowell’s homosexual feelings toward Russell. However, as their relationship continued, Lowell’s poetry about Russell became more and more explicit about the nature of their relationship.

The confluence of Lowell’s personal and professional lives harmed her reputation as a poet. Her involvement in the promotion of the Imagist poetry movement of the early 1900s brought her the wrath of the movement’s unofficial leader, the influential poet Ezra Pound, who insulted and jeered her publicly. Her relationship with Russell, coupled with her unconventional habits of wearing men’s clothing and smoking cigars, led to her poetry being dismissed by critics who were uncomfortable with her homosexual – and eccentric – lifestyle. Her critical reputation was nearly destroyed by the controversy that surrounded Lowell.

With her family’s wealth and influence behind her, Lowell was able to overcome the critical snubs personally if not professionally. Despite the critical drubbing she and her own poetry received, Lowell made her family’s estate in Brookline, Sevenals, a hub for poetry, and became a patron of several American poets. She studied poetry avidly, and wrote a two-volume biography of the poet John Keats. Her interest in Chinese, Japanese and Early English poetry helped to popularize these poetic forms in the 20th century.

When Lowell died in 1925, her literary reputation was hardly secure. However, in 1926, she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection What’s O’ Clock. Throughout the remainder of the 20th Century, her poetry became more and more widely anthologized and read, restoring her reputation as one of the best American poets of the early 20th Century.

Poems by Amy Lowell:

Patterns

The Taxi

The End

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, the son of wealthy parents, his father an attorney.

From childhood, Longfellow was preoccupied with words and writing, and even as a youth contributed poems and criticism to journals and periodicals.

Highly intelligent and motivated, Longfellow entered Bowdoin College at the age of fourteen, graduating at the age of eighteen. His love of poetry and language were apparent to the faculty even at this young age, and shortly after graduation and a short stint in his father’s law office, Longfellow returned to Bowdoin to teach.

Interspersing his teaching with trips to Europe that included visits to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and Switzerland, Longfellow remained at Bowdoin for twenty-five years.

While teaching at Bowdoin, Longfellow married his first wife, Mary Storer Potter, who died during a miscarriage on one of the couple’s trips to Europe.

Longfellow began teaching at Harvard in 1836, where he published his first collections of poems. However, his duties to his academic career hampered his writing career. Longfellow eventually married again, to Frances Appleton, who would bear him six children before her death in a fire after eighteen years of marriage.

In 1847, Longfellow published Evangeline, a lengthy poem about the British banishment of the French from Canada. The success of Evangeline reenergized Longfellow, and in 1854, he stopped teaching to devote himself to his poetry, and in a short time published two of the poems for which he was best known for, Hiawatha and “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

The death of his wife in 1861 was a blow to Longfellow, who by this time was a great literary success, with his poems widely read and translated. He was a favorite of other writers, such as Dickens, Whitman, and Hawthorne, and a particular favorite of President Abraham Lincoln.

Although he did not publish for two years after Frances’ death, Longfellow continued to publish poetry right up until two years before his death. He died in 1882, the bard of American Literature and one of the most famous Americans of his time, his poetry read throughout the world.

Some of Longfellow’s most famous shorter poems include:

The Day is Done

Hymn to the Night

Snow-Flakes

Born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885, David Herbert Lawrence’s childhood was spent around the colleries of the Eastwood area, where his father and most of the other men in his family worked as miners. Although Lawrence received a scholarship to attend a local high school, he dropped out to work as a factory clerk. His friendship with Jessie Chambers, who tutored him and encouraged his writing, saved Lawrence from a career clerking and instead set him upon the path to teaching.

By 1911, Lawrence’s health was suffering due to recurring bouts of pneumonia. He quit teaching and eloped to Europe with Frieda Weekley, the German-born wife of a professor in Nottingham.

Lawrence’s eventual marriage to Weekley did nothing to stem the controversy that surrounded the couple. As they traveled about Europe, they encountered both intolerance of their unusual lifestyle, and, as World War I began, discrimination against Weekley due to her German birth. They traveled to such exotic locales as Ceylon, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Mexico before settling in the United States in Taos, New Mexico for a time.

The fact that he’d eloped with a married woman was only one of the more unusual facets of Lawrence’s personality that would affect both his personal life and his writing. His radical views on sex, psychology, and even nature influenced his lifestyle – which at one time included a group of female followers who quarreled and competed for his favors – and his work. His novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and his collection of poetry Pansies (1929) were both banned in England for their sexual content, and would remain banned for decades. Incidentally, Lawrence’s writing was not the only cause for controversy – a London gallery displaying his paintings was raided and his paintings seized.

Lawrence and Weekley continued to travel the world, motivated both by a desire to escape the controversies and troubles that swirled around them, but also in a desperate attempt to find some sort of relief for the “bronchials” that Lawrence suffered with throughout his life. The “bronchials” were, in actuality, tuberculosis, although Lawrence refused to acknowledge his suffering as such. However, by the late 1920s it was obvious to all who were close to Lawrence that tuberculosis had ravaged his health. Lawrence died from the disease in France in 1930.

Poems By D.H. Lawrence:

How Beastly the Bourgeois Is

Trees in the Garden

Piano

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Few poets are more beloved by more people than Rudyard Kipling. A favorite of readers both young and old, known the world over, Rudyard Kipling’s poems – and stories – have proven both popular and evergreen.

Born Joseph Rudyard Kipling in 1865, Kipling was the son of Britons born in Bombay, India. At the age of five, young Kipling was sent to England to be educated, a traumatic experience that marked his childhood. Uncomfortable in England, Kipling returned to India as soon as he was able, at the age of 17. Kipling’s first – and only job – was as a writer, beginning as a journalist and editor for a magazine for Britons living in India.

In 1886, Kipling’s first collection of poetry, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses was published. Only two years later, he published his first book of prose, Plain Tales from the Hills.

In the early 1890s, Kipling gained worldwide fame with the publication of Barrack-Room Ballad, in which were two of his most famous poems, the exotic “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay.” These poems brought the experience of Britons in India to the world at large, and only encouraged Kipling to continue to write poems and stories about India, tales and verses of adventure that brought a country unknown to most to readers worldwide.

Kipling married in 1892 and left his beloved India for Vermont, where he continued his fascination with India by writing the two Jungle Books and Kim. For several years he traveled the world, both with his family and alone, spending the Boer War in South Africa, continuing to publish both prose and poetry, including the novel Captains Courageous and Just-So Stories.

In 1901, Kipling and his family settled in Sussex, England, permanently. While in Sussex, Kipling wrote many poems and stories, among them his best-known poem, “If.”

Rudyard Kipling died on January 18, 1936. At the time of his death, he was one of the most famous and beloved authors of his time. From the whimsy and humor of Just-So Stories to the adventure of “Gunga-Din” to the stately advice of “If,” Rudyard Kipling’s writing has proven to be timeless, and still fascinates and delights children and adults alike.

Poems By Rudyard Kipling:

Gunga-Din

If

Seal Lullaby

Poet John Keats achieved, in less than 30 years, an immortality that has lasted more than a century. His poems still read as much or more as they were in his lifetime, Keats has become one of the most celebrated poets of all time.

Born in London in 1795, Keats was the child of a working class family. At the age of 15, he was apprenticed to a surgeon in order to learn a trade with which to support himself. However, despite his successful apprenticeship, Keats displayed an even larger talent for poetry than for medicine, translating Virgil and writing his own long poetry.

By 1818, around the age of 23, Keats published his “Endymion: A Poetic Romance” to mixed but mostly favorable reviews. However, the poor reviews afflicted Keats so that he fell into a sickness that revealed itself later to be the beginnings of tuberculosis.
JOHN KEATS was born in London, October 29, 1795, and he died of consumption, February 23, 1821, in Rome.

Born in the common walks of life, it was necessary for him to rely upon his own efforts for a support. He was educated at Enfield. Choosing medicine as a profession, he was apprenticed, at the age of fifteen, to a surgeon at Edmonton. Although he spent most of his time in literary study, yet he completed his apprenticeship creditably and repaired to London to complete his work in the hospital.

Despite his poor health, Keats continued to write almost fanatically, and in 1820 published a collection of poems that included “Lamia,” “Isabella,” and “Hyperion.” This volume of poetry elevated Keats’ status in the literary world to one of a master poet, who gained the attention of such vaunted Romantic poets as Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, a former critic of Keats who now claimed Keats’ poetry to be as “subline as Aeschylus.”

However, Keats’ new-found fame was to be in vain. His health was such that it was recommended that he go to the more temperate climate in Italy, but the journey itself was so arduous that Keats’ became worse rather than better, and in February of 1821 succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Although Keats’ life was all too brief, he left a legacy of poetry that has only gained in stature since his death.

Poems By Keats:

When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be:

To Solitude:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

Poet Ted Hughes stormy private life often overshadowed his poetry, giving him a notoriety that even the most readable and accessible of poets rarely achieve. Known primarily to modern audiences as Sylvia Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes’ poetry nevertheless earned him a place as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Ted Hughes was born in 1930 in Yorkshire, in the colorfully named village of Mytholmroyd. His early life was marked by his father’s experience as one of the few soldiers to survive the British battle at Gallipoli during World War I. Despite his father’s harrowing experience, Hughes joined the Royal Air Force, then went on to Pembroke College where he studied English, archaeology, and anthropology. His readings in mythology would later influence his poetry.

In Cambridge in 1956, Hughes met American Fulbright scholar Sylvia Plath, also a poet and writer. The two married, and for awhile taught at the University of Massachusetts. They returned to England in 1959, with Hughes a published and award-winning poet, but their relationship began to suffer, and in 1963, Plath left Hughes and committed suicide.

Critics in America excoriated Hughes for his perceived role in Plath’s death, despite the fact that he abandoned his own career as a poet to publish and promote Plath’s poetry, and his decision as her literary executor to destroy parts of Plath’s diaries did him no favors.

Hughes’ situation would unfortunately continue to spiral. His second wife, Assia Gutmann Wevill, committed suicide in 1969, also killing their young daughter, Shura. A year after Wevill’s death, Hughes married again, this time to Carol Orchard, whom he would be married to unto his death.

After the turbulent and tragic 1960s, Hughes began to write poetry again, and also to write non-fiction and even children’s books. His literary reputation in Europe was not as maligned as it was in the U.S., where he was always associated with the suicides of his first two wives, Plath in particular, and Hughes received many awards in Europe, eventually being appointed England’s Poet Laureate. He died of cancer in 1998 in his native England, still the country’s Poet Laureate.

Poems by Ted Hughes:

Lovesong

The Thought-Fox

Crow’s Fall