Explore Poets
Each poet we record has their own full page in the Archive. Here we can tell you about their writing life, biographies, histories, awards and more...
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565 poets
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Fergus Allen
B. 1921 D. 2017
Allen writes poetry that is limpid, very subtle and marvellously wise. - William Boyd
Poet
Poet
John Ashbery
B. 1927 D. 2017
For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does...it's not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture. - John Ashbery
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Charles Boyle
B. 1951
Resonant and lyrical, linguistically precise and emotionally evasive, often at the same time - The Guardian
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Anna Laetitia Barbauld
B. 1743 D. 1825
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest; / O born to rule in partial Law's despite, / Resume thy native empire o'er the breast! Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 'The Rights of Women'
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Anne Bradstreet
B. 1612 D. 1672
All things within this fading world hath end. ('Before the Birth of One of Her Children')
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Alison Brackenbury
B. 1953
Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet. Gillian Clark
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Rachael Boast
B. 1975
Her quietly assured verse demonstrates its real sophistication in the intelligence of its commentary. To put it another way, she says such interesting things that you want to know what comes next. - Independent
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Ruth Bidgood
B. 1922 D. 2022
She deserves unequivocal recognition as one of Wales's foremost English-language poets of the last half-century. - Matthew Jarvis
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Diana Bridge
B. 1942
All this was water / in the beginning. Between / us are our legends - 'Chrysanthemum', Diana Bridge
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William Blake
B. 1757 D. 1827
The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself. William Blake