Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, MP for the Duke of Norfolk’s pocket borough of Shoreham-by-sea. Shelley was educated at Eton, where he was known as ‘Mad Shelley’, and University College…

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…

Hone Tuwhare (1922 — 2008) is New Zealand’s pre-eminent Maori poet; his tribal affiliations are with Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Popoto and Te Uri o Hua.  From a working class background (at fifteen he was apprenticed as…

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes moved to Jamaica in 1971 and spent most of his childhood and early adult life there. As well as poetry, he is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and plays; he also practices as…

Gavin Ewart was born in London in 1916, of Scottish descent. He was educated at Wellington College, Berkshire, and Christ’s College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, Ewart was literary editor of Granta. In 1933, at the age of seventeen, Ewart’s first…

Denis Glover emerged as a poet in New Zealand in the 1930s, one of the new artistic generation of modernists and nationalists. A product of two of New Zealand’s elite secondary schools — Auckland Grammar School and Christ’s College —…

Jon Stallworthy was educated at Dragon School, Rugby School, and Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize while playing rugby for the University, and held a post as Emeritus Professor of English. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, the…

Born in Birmingham, England, Cilla McQueen moved to New Zealand when she was four years old. She ranks amongst the finest poets of her generation, with honours which include three New Zealand Book Awards, the 2009 Prime Minister’s Award for…

Velma Pollard was born in 1937. She grew up in Woodside, a rural Jamaican village, where her mother was a school teacher and her father was a farmer: their interest in the arts was to be one of the main…

Sinead Morrissey is the author of five collections of poetry, the last four of which have been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award. Her most recent, Parallax, won the coveted prize in 2013. Her work has received numerous accolades including the Patrick…

Frederick William Harvey is remembered today as a poet and central figure in a circle, including Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells, which emerged in Gloucester before the First World War. In the inter-war years, working as a solicitor, Harvey became…

Keats was born in London in 1795. His father was killed in a riding accident when Keats was eight; his mother died six years later, probably from tuberculosis. The loss of his parents, especially of his mother, was to help…

Many readers first come across Christina Rossetti as the writer of the words of the carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, or the deceptively simple, but actually strange and powerful, fairy tale in verse, Goblin Market. But her work ranges widely,…

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the tenth and youngest child of the schoolmaster of the country town of Ottery St Mary. After the death of his father he attended Christ’s Hospital School: ‘I was reared / In the…

Robert Browning was born in South London in 1812. He was largely self-educated, utilising his father’s extensive library of over six thousand volumes. A voracious reader, Browning would later draw on his wide and sometimes arcane learning in his poetry,…

Selima Hill is perhaps best known for her surrealism. Pierre Reverdy has said of surrealism that ‘the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true […] the greater its emotional power and poetic reality’; this certainly…

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…

Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumbria, in 1770, the son of an attorney. Both parents were dead by the time he was thirteen, a loss recorded in the early part of ‘The Prelude’ where he describes with vivid intensity his…