One of the lions of American poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s verses have endured across centuries to become some of the best known and best loved in the English language.

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

While D.H. Lawrence is known to modern audiences primarily as a novelist and short story writer, the author’s initial forays into literature were his poems.

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

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

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

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”

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:

Good metrical rhymed verse, if it’s to grip the imagination and stay readable, has to have, as well as those external formal features, the same dynamo of hidden musical dramatic laws as the apparently free verse. ~ Ted Hughes

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