Yomi Sode is a greatly celebrated and vitally needed voice in the UK’s poetry scene. Born in Oyo State Nigeria, his entry into the world of storytelling came in the form of musicality, a quality easily witnessed in his approach to brilliantly paced and finely woven stories.

  Playful, impassioned, deftly musical and energised, Selina Tusitala Marsh’s poems leap off the page and bet to be read aloud. Hers is a poetry often balanced between two seemingly distinct worlds: a modern New Zealand that is urbane, cultured…

Mary Jo Salter describes herself as a ‘particularly formal poet’. Her attention to and rigorous engagement with poetic form is not only manifested across her eight books of poetry, but in her co-editorship of the Norton Anthology of Poetry in…

From Scots dialect to Frank O’Hara and the New York School, from the candidly personal to unusual dramatic monologues, David Kinloch’s poetry is stylistically, thematically and emotionally wide-ranging. Kinloch first emerged, alongside Robert Crawford and other now established names, as…

Anna Crowe is a poet and translator based in St Andrews, Fife. Born in Plymouth, which in interview she says is “as far from Scotland as one can get in the UK,” Crowe moved to St Andrews to study and…

Charles Wolfe was an Irish priest and poet who is best remembered for this extremely popular elegy, which has appeared in many anthologies of poetry throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wolfe was educated at Trinity College Dublin and, at…

Written over several years in the 1740s, Gray’s elegy was eventually published in 1751 and enjoyed phenomenal popularity for the next two hundred years. Gray was a versatile poet. He wrote elegant lyric and dramatic poems, Latin translations, odes and…

Jonson was a skilful satirist of contemporary society, producing Volpone for the stage in 1606 and The Alchemist in 1610. It is highly likely that Shakespeare would have appeared in a production of another of Jonson’s plays, Every Man in…

Chidiock Tichborne was part of the Babington plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. When the Protestant Elizabeth came to the throne, Catholics such as Tichborne had a degree of freedom to practise their faith. However, when Elizabeth was excommunicated by…

W. N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961 and educated at Brasenose, Oxford, where he published his thesis on Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He is currently Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Herbert…

Marlowe is believed to have written all his poems and translations as a young man studying at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, and was the son of a shoemaker. Ovid’s elegies…

Sam Hunt is a rare commodity in New Zealand: a ham actor playing to the gallery and willing to go out on a limb; he’s also a highly-effective poet, wise about his craft, while being a national icon. Partly this…

John Milton was born in 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, the son of a composer and scrivener. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge and seemed destined for the priesthood. However, at Cambridge he began to…