John Donne was the greatest non-dramatic poet of his time, and its most admired preacher. He was born in 1571, a Londoner and the son of Catholic parents. In his teens, he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, and in his…

Born in The Netherlands, Riemke Ensing moved to New Zealand in 1951. A distinguished poet, Ensing’s life has also been spent as a tutor at The University of Auckland (NZ), where until recently she was an honorary research fellow, as…

In the 1950s and 60s Ruth Gilbert received more than her fair share of male condescension and negativity. Reviewing The Luthier (which won the Jessie Mackay Memorial Award for Verse along with James K. Baxter’s Pig Island Letters) Louis Johnson…

Robert Lee Frost, named after the Confederate general, was born in 1874 in California, nine years after the end of the Civil War. His father was an unsuccessful politician and a severe and humourless man; he suffered bouts of depression…

Emily Bronte was born in 1818, the daughter of Irishman Patrick Bronte, perpetual curate of Haworth, Yorkshire. Emily’s mother died in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of their aunt. Four of the daughters were sent…

George Byron was born in 1788 with a deformed foot: he limped all his life. His father was ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, an infamous adventurer who abandoned his wife and family in 1790 and died in 1791. At the age of…

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, the son of a stonemason. He trained and practised as an architect, but, as soon as he could, earned his living by writing the novels which made him famous. Then, after Jude the Obscure…

John Clare, the son of a casual labourer, was born in Helpstone, Northamptonshire. His twin sister died a few weeks after their birth and he was brought up in poverty, only attending school very occasionally because his father couldn’t keep…

George Herbert was born 3 April 1593 in Montgomery, Powys, Wales and died at the age of forty. He was descended on his father’s side from the earls of Pembroke and on his mother’s from a family of Shropshire knights….

Gerard Hopkins was born in 1844, went to Highgate School and won a scholarship to Balliol College Oxford where he took a double first in Classics. He then entered the Society of Jesus and, feeling that writing poetry was too…

Geoff Page is a poet, reviewer and advocate for Australian poetry. Born in Grafton on the north coast of New South Wales, into a conservative and politically active family of graziers on the Clarence River, he was educated at the…

M. K. (Michael Kennedy) Joseph was among the foremost New Zealand writers of his generation, both as poet and novelist. Born in Chingford, Essex to Catholic parents, who, after some years in post-war Belgium and France, immigrated to New Zealand…

Charles Brasch belonged to a generation of New Zealand poets who, rising to prominence in the 1940s, expressed anxieties that, while personal and pākehā (non-Maori), seemed endemic to both the nation and the century. They saw themselves as forging, through…

In its vivid, hypnotic and often startlingly imaginative qualities, the poetry of Alice Oswald (b. 1966) confirms a unique sensibility at work. From her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize…

Dorothea Smartt is a stunning performance artist and poet. She has taught in the United Kingdom, and Bahrain, South Africa, Barbados and the U.S, after beginning her writing life in the Black/feminist co-operatives of the Eighties, and publishing her first…

In 2009, WS Merwin won the Pulizer Prize for poetry for the second time, with The Shadow of Sirius. In an interview soon afterward, Merwin recalls his earliest observations about poetry: “The idea of writing to me was from the…

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet and academic, partner of artist Simon Edmonds and mother of children, Johnny and Elvira. Her poetry was first published in book form in AUP New Poets 1 (AUP, 1999). Since, Jackson has published…

Alistair Paterson (ONZM) is one of New Zealand’s leading poets, editors and literary thinkers. He is the author of nine poetry collections, a novel, plays and numerous critical publications including The New Poetry: Considerations Towards Open Form (1981) which laid…