Poet Robert Browning, like his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, achieved fame close to notoriety in the Victorian era, due in part to his accomplished poetry, and in some measure to the romantic tale of his and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s marriage and life.

Robert Browning was born near London, England, in 1812 to Robert and Sarah Anna Browning.

Browning’s unusual family no doubt contributed to his art. His father, an intellectual whose library contained around 6000 volumes, was a banker who’d shunned his father’s slave-run plantations in the West Indies for life as an abolitionist in London. It was rumored that Browning’s Jamaican grandmother was a mulatto. Browning’s mother was a musician.

Browning was a precociously intelligent child who’d written his first book of poetry by the age of 12 was fluent in several languages by the age of 14. …

The epitome of the Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of few poets whose work was not only widely appreciated during her lifetime, but whose verses have also entered the language of popular culture in such a way that her poems seem to have lives of their own.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life reads like the kind of mid-1930s Hollywood melodrama that it eventually was. Born in 1806 to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke, Elizabeth Barrett was the oldest of 12 children, 11 of whom survived to adulthood. The Barretts were a wealthy part-Creole family whose Jamaican sugar plantations had sustained the family for centuries. However, Edward Barrett chose to raise his family in England, perhaps to distance them from the family’s source of wealth – plantations run by slave labor.

Elizabeth was educated at home, and in fact …

Although she is better known for her novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (1818-1848) also managed in her short lifetime to write many accomplished poems which display the same mystical ingenuity that her only published novel has become famous for.

Born in Yorkshire, in the north of England, Emily Bronte was the daughter of a reverend and writer who instilled in Emily and her siblings – Anne, Charlotte, and Bramwell – a love for poetry and literature.

Along with her sisters and brother, Emily Bronte escaped a childhood beset by loneliness and poverty in the moors of Northern England by reading and later writing, collaborating on stories about the imaginary kingdom of Angria as children, and as young adults by dedicating themselves to their individual writings.

In 1837, Emily accepted one of the few positions available for gentlewomen of the time – that of …

By turns whimsical and apocalyptic, brilliant and yet somehow simple, British poet William Blake (1757–1827) expanded the boundaries of poetry both with language and visuals to create a body of work that has become among the most beloved in the English language.

Known more for his visual arts than his poetry in his lifetime, Blake’s poetry was often illustrated by his own drawings and woodcuts. While illustrated books of poetry and prose were hardly unheard of in Blake’s time, Blake, dissatisfied with current methods of printing, began experimenting with the process itself, eventually creating new forms altogether.

One such example was called “illuminated printing.” According to the Royal Academy of Art, Blake’s illuminated printing process began with pages printed on copper plates that contained text within an image. After the page was printed, the illustrations were then colored with …

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

Esso cans. Cats named Minnow. Fish houses. All the detritus of everyday life, scenes and items and even people destined for obsolescence – these are are subjects that Elizabeth Bishop captured in her poetry, these things filled with the intent to be lost.

Maybe Bishop herself was a little afraid of being lost. Born in Massachusetts in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop was raised by a succession of relatives after her father’s death and her mother’s hospitalization. As a result of this shuffle from house to house, Bishop once commented that she evermore felt like “a guest.” Educated at Vassar, Bishop was all set to attend medical school when the …