Rupert Brooke
English poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) won fame for his idealistic 1914 war sonnets, above all “The Soldier,” and for his early death en route to Gallipoli. A look at his life, poems, style, and reputation.
Theme
poet-biography
22 poems
poet-biography
Matthew Arnold
The Victorian poet and critic behind “Dover Beach”: a life spent bridging faith and doubt, Romantic feeling and classical restraint, poetry and the criticism that made him the “sage” of his age.
John Donne
Foremost of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne fused intellect, passion, and faith — from audacious love lyrics to the Holy Sonnets and the sermons that made him Dean of St Paul’s.
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), the Pulitzer-winning poet of working-class America, made free verse a hymn to ordinary people — from “Chicago” to his monumental life of Lincoln.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A Pulitzer-winning virtuoso of the sonnet and a symbol of the modern “New Woman,” Millay burned her candle at both ends — pouring love, desire, and fierce independence into some of the finest American verse of her century.
Sara Teasdale
An American master of the short lyric, Teasdale won the prize that became the Pulitzer and wrote some of the most quietly haunting poems of her age — from “There Will Come Soft Rains” to “Barter” — on love, beauty, and loss.
A. E. Housman
Classical scholar by day and lyric poet by vocation, Housman distilled youth, lost love, and mortality into the spare, unforgettable poems of A Shropshire Lad — beloved music made out of restraint and sorrow.
Thomas Hardy
Famous first as a novelist, Hardy gave his last thirty years to the poetry he loved most — “The Darkling Thrush,” the haunting elegies for his wife Emma — facing time, chance, and loss with unflinching, tender honesty.
Lord Byron
Poet, celebrity, exile, and creator of the Byronic hero: Byron lived as boldly as he wrote, from “She Walks in Beauty” to the satirical sweep of Don Juan, before dying at thirty-six in the cause of Greek freedom.
William Blake
Poet, painter, and prophet, Blake hand-printed his own illuminated books and saw imagination as the deepest truth — from “The Tyger” to Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Dismissed in his day, now hailed as a singular genius.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The most radical of the Romantics, dead at twenty-nine: Shelley fused lyrical beauty with political fire in “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Prometheus Unbound, certain that imagination could remake the world.
John Keats
Dead at twenty-five after barely five years of writing, the English Romantic poured beauty and mortality into the great odes of 1819 — and became one of the most beloved poets in the language.