Phillis Wheatley was the first US slave to publish a book of poems. Born in Africa in about 1753 and shipped as an 8 year old child to the Boston Slave Market, she was purchased by John Wheatley to be…

Clive Wilmer’s first collection of poems, The Dwelling-Place (Carcanet, 1977), opens with an epigraph from John Ruskin’s Val d’Arno, which begins: “A man’s religion is the form of mental rest, or dwelling-place, which, partly, his fathers have gained or built…

Dick Davis, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been hailed by the TLS as ‘our finest translator of Persian poetry’, and retired in 2012 from the Ohio State University where he was Professor of Persian and Chair…

C. H. Sisson died in 2003 at the age of 89. He was known as a critic, political theorist, poet, novelist, and translator. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly….

Henry Vaughan was born in 1621 in the Welsh country parish of Llansantffread between the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, where he lived for nearly the whole of his life. His younger twin brother, Thomas, became a reputed alchemist….

Lewis Carroll was the literary pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832, the third in a family of eleven children; he had seven younger sisters. In childhood, he produced magazines for his sisters which display his love of parody,…

Greta Stoddart was born in Henley-on-Thames, and grew up in Oxford and Belgium. She studied drama at Manchester University then trained as an actor in Paris, touring for five years with the theatre company she co-founded, Brouhaha, before settling in…

Adelaide Anne Proctor’s father was a poet, and her mother actively encouraged her daughter’s interest in poetry. She submitted her early work to Charles Dickens’s publication Household Words under the pseudonym Miss Berwick. When Dickens became aware that Miss Berwick…

At various times, Walt Whitman was a teacher, a journalist, a government official and a clerk. He also spent a significant period in his life working in the hospitals of the American Civil War, and witnessed the acute suffering of…

Robert Bridges was a trained doctor working in London hospitals until 1882, a classicist and poet who served as Poet Laureate from 1913 until his death in 1930. Educated at Eton and Corpus Christi college, Bridges edited and published the…

Intellectually gifted Mary Coleridge was the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her parents were impressively well connected to writers and musicians in the London of the last half of the nineteenth century. Mary met weekly with friends in the late…

Chesterton is probably best known for his popular priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared in over fifty short stories. However, he was also a poet, biographer, essayist, dramatist, critic, journalist, advocate of a political movement called ‘Distributism’ and, after his conversion…

Amy Lowell was born into an affluent Massachusetts family and educated at home and in private schools in Boston. Her financial resources helped her develop a liberated and unconventional lifestyle. Amy Lowellonce remarked that God had made her a businesswoman…

Charlotte Mew was surrounded by mental ill health and death from a young age. Three brothers died while she was still a child and two other siblings were committed to mental institutions. She vowed never to marry, fearful of the…

Anne Finch was an aristocrat acquainted with the most famous poet of the age, Alexander Pope. However, during her lifetime, her poetry was little known and would have remained obscure had not William Wordsworth praised it, particularly her depictions of nature, in an essay…

Christopher Smart was born in 1722 and is best remembered for his religious poems A Song to David and Jubilate Agno, both of which were written during his time at St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, London. He believed that God…