Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) lived a life of quiet dedication to her art not unlike that of her more famous contemporary, Elizabeth Jennings, who wrote the introduction to a Selected edition of Pitter’s work. Highly regarded critically at the time, Pitter’s…

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a poet whose troubled life and powerful work remains a source of controversy. Born in Boston in the USA she was precociously intelligent, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. The same year her…

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was a poet whose work thrives on contrast and contradiction: English tradition and American idiom; strict form and free verse; intellectual discipline and physical hedonism are all held in balance in his risk-taking poetry. Gunn was born…

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) led an outwardly uneventful life behind the respectable curtains of suburbia whilst nurturing a highly individual imagination. Born in Yorkshire, her father left the family to join the North Sea Patrol when she was very young. At…

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) remains one of the legendary figures in 20th Century poetry, both for the impact of his visionary, musical verse, and for the notoriety of his private life. Born in Swansea, Wales, Thomas was named after a character…

John Berryman (1914-1972) was born John Smith Jnr. in rural Oklahoma, the product of an unhappy marriage between a small-town banker and schoolteacher. When he was eight, Berryman suffered the defining trauma of his life when his father killed himself…

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was born and brought up in Cambridge Massachusetts, and is remembered above all for his startling innovations in syntax and typography. His early experiments in poetry whilst still a child were encouraged by liberal parents to…

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) packed a huge amount into his sixty years: a rollercoaster of triumphs and disasters that informed his writing and pushed back the boundaries of what was deemed suitable subject matter for poetry. He was born into an…

Ogden Nash ( 1902-1971) was a master, perhaps the 20th Century master, of light verse whose continuing popularity shows that the term ‘light’ is not incompatible with long-lasting. He was born in Rye, New York, but as a child moved…

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is now recognised as the central figure of Anglo/American modernism, the man who did most to shape the movement which in turn did most to shape the 20th Century cultural landscape in the west. Born in Idaho…

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) was an innovator, both in subject matter and form, writing in the transcendental tradition of Emerson and Thoreau but making it his own. The key to his powerful identification with nature can be found in his childhood….

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) is often grouped with such poets as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Robert Lowell as a leading figure in the so-called ‘Confessional Movement’. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts into an upper middle-class home, Sexton never…

R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) teemed with contradictions: a passionate advocate of Welsh nationalism he wrote in English and sent his son to boarding school in England; an undemonstrative man he composed the most tender elegies for his wife; a man…

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is one of the most successful children’s writers in the world: around thirty million of his books have been sold in the U.K. alone. Children love his poems and stories because he writes from their point of…

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…

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a larger-than-life character who is now best known for his Cautionary Verses but who also wrote fiction, essays, history, biography and huge numbers of letters. He was born in a village just outside Paris on the…

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) was a poet whose work and life were moulded by his experience of the First World War. Blunden was born in London but grew up in Kent, a childhood which laid the foundation for his deep love…

Edwin Brock (1927-1997) wrote two of the best-known poems of the last century, ‘Five Ways to Kill a Man’ and ‘Song of the Battery Hen’, but his work deserves wider recognition beyond these anthology favourites. Born in South London in…