The poems that made Wilfred Owen famous were mostly published after his death in action a week before the end of the First World War. Powerfully influenced by Keats and Shelley, he experimented with verse from childhood, but found his…

Will Burns is a poet and novelist. He first came to prominence in 2014 as a Faber New Poet and has since authored poetry collections ‘Country Music’ (Offord Road Books, 2020) which won the 2021 Laurel Prize for best first collection, & ‘Germ Songs’ (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He released the album Chalk Hill Blue in 2019, a collaboration with composer Hannah Peel whose music was set to his poems. (Hannah Peel, 2019.) His debut novel, The Paper Lantern (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021) saw Burns named among The Observer’s Top 10 Debut Novelists of 2021. He is Poet-In-Residence at Caught By The River.

William Barnes was a Dorset dialect poet and artist. An extremely learned man with knowledge of many languages, he worked for some time as a schoolteacher, running his own schools with his wife, before being ordained into the Church of…

William Blake was born in London in 1757 and spent most of his long life there. The son of a hosier, he left ordinary school at the age of ten to join a drawing school, and at fourteen became apprenticed…

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) stands at the turning point between the Victorian period and Modernism, the conflicting currents of which affected his poetry. Born in Dublin, Yeats’ family moved to London when he was two and he lived there until…

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) famously combined the two careers of doctor and writer, along the way founding a specifically American version of Modernism. He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, the son of a New York businessman of British extraction…

William Cowper was a popular poet and writer of hymns. His descriptions of everyday life in the English countryside changed nature writing in the eighteenth century, in many ways preparing the ground for poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cowper…

William Empson (1906-1984) is best remembered as one of the most important and idiosyncratic literary critics of the 20th Century but he was also an influential poet whose output, though small, was held in high esteem by such figures as…

Little is known about Shakespeare’s life. Existing records give tantalising glimpses: he was born in 1564, the eldest son of an illiterate but locally prominent Stratford glover, married (at eighteen) the twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway, had three children of whom one,…