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, …

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 …

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 …

“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 …

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 …