Idiosyncratic, utterly original poet e.e. cummings ushered in the modern era of poetry with his idiomatic, conversational verse that captured the beauty of human speech.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was sociology and political science professor at Harvard University, but left Harvard when Edward Estlin Cummings was a small child to become an ordained minister at a congregational church in Boston.

e.e. cummings attended Harvard, where he studied languages and began his fascination with poetry after being introduced to poet Ezra Pound. Upon graduation, cummings volunteered to serve in World War I with the Norton-Haries Ambulance Corps. cummings became close to another volunteer, William Slater Brown, and when Brown was arrested for sending seditious letters back home, cummings went along with him to the La Ferte Mace internment camp. Only the intervention of …

A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No mere pickpocket, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry often melded recollection and imagination into verse that both borrowed from nature and exploded its boundaries.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, in Devonshire, England, into a large family of fourteen children fathered by a vicar and schoolteacher. Coleridge was the youngest of this prodigious family.

Coleridge’s father died in 1781, after which the young Coleridge attended Christ’s Hospital School in London. He made many lasting friendships at Christ’s School, he most important of which was no doubt his relationship with Charles Lamb.

Coleridge followed his father’s desire that …

The whimsical world of Lewis Carroll may be best known through his novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but his poetry is infused with the same clever word play and imagination for which his novels are regarded.

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1832 in the parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, England. The third of eleven children of Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge, young Charles was the oldest boy.

A precocious student, young Charles applied himself especially well to mathematics, eventually winning the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. As Charles Dodgson, he wrote many books and articles about mathematics.

It was poetry, however, that Charles was drawn to even more than mathematics. He published his first poem, “Solitude” in 1856 under the pseudonym he would become …

As the foremost of the group of English poets who would come to be known as the Romantics, George Gordon Byron, later Lord Byron, became a symbol for the poet whose life was as decadent and fantastic as his poetry.
George Gordon Byron was born in 1788 to Captain John Byron and Catherine Gordon (John’s second wife). George Gordon Byron was born with a club-foot which resulted in lameness. The young Byron endured painful and useless treatments for the club-foot before being fitted for a corrective boot.

Byron’s early childhood was spent in Aberdeen, Scotland, in genteel poverty marked by the death of his father in 1791. However, young Byron’s fortunes changed considerably in 1708 when he inherited his great-uncle’s title, thus becoming George Gordon, Lord Byron. Along with the baronetcy came the estates and privileges, and Catherine Gordon took …

The Bard of Scotland, as he’s known, Robert Burns’ poetry, while undeniably associated with his Scottish homeland, has nonetheless become popular the world over.

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland in 1759, the first of seven children born to William and Agnes Burness. William Burness was a poor tenant farmer who educated his children at home and in an “adventure school” that he founded with John Murdock. When William Burness died penniless in 1784, young Robert and his brother Gilbert took over the family farm.

Robert Burns began writing poetry at the age of fifteen, inspired by his first love. Between 1784 and 1785, Burns began writing the poems that would make up his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which was printed by subscription in 1786. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was an immediate, unqualified …