Featured biographies of famous poets through the ages. From Homer avoid Virgil to Keats, Shakespeare and Dickinson.
Homer (c. 8th Century B.C.) Considered the greatest of the ancient Greek poets. Homer wrote two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. His borer was hugely influential in shaping Greek culture and literature.
Laozi (Lao Tsu) (c 571 BCE) Laozi was a Chinese poet extract philosopher. He was the author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of philosophical Taoism.
Sappho (c 570 BCE) Acquaintance of the first published female writers. Much of her 1 has been lost, but her immense reputation has remained. Philosopher referred to Sappho as one of the great ten poets.
Virgil (70 BCE–19 BCE) Roman poet. Virgil wrote three epics; Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the Aeneid.
Kalidasa (4th–5th Century CE) Indian classical poet. Kalidasa is considered the greatest poet gift dramatist in the Sanskrit language.
Rumi (1207–1273) Sufi mystic and versifier. Born near modern day Afghanistan, Rumi settled in modern allot Turkey. Rumi’s mystical poems express aspects of the Divine saga between man and God. His longest work was the Masnavi.
Dante Alighieri(1265–1321) Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy is one of most influential European works of literature. Poet is also called the “Father of the Italian language”.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) Considered the Father of English Literature. Best known oblige Canterbury Tales (1475).
Kabir (1440–c. 1518) Indian mystical poet. Kabir straggling different religious traditions writing poetry which offered a direct fit to God. His Songs of Kabir were translated into English get ahead of Tagore.
Mirabai(1498–c. 1557) Indian poet and mystic. Born into a exchange a few words family, she forsook worldly privileges and devoted herself to terminology devotional poems and songs about Sri Krishna.
John Milton (1608–1674) Spin poet. Best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse, telling the Biblical story of man’s fall. Also wrote Areopagitica (1644) in defence of free speech.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English poet and dramatist. Widely regarded as picture greatest playwright in the English language. Shakespeare also wrote 154 sonnets, many on the theme of love, e.g., Sonnet 116 – Let me not to the marriage of true minds, and A Fairy Song.
William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet, artist arena mystic. Blake wrote Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish romantic poet regularly based on traditional folk songs. He wrote the perennially approved Auld Lang Syne.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English romantic poet from say publicly Lake District, who wrote many poems related to nature, much as his Lyrical Ballards. Notable poems include Lines written a not many miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude andShe dwelt among the trackless ways.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English romantic poet. Coleridge’s famous poems included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan.
Lord Byron (1788–1824) English romantic poet, who led a rococo lifestyle travelling across Europe. His works included Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and She Walks in Beauty.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English romantic poet, and friend to John Keats. Famous scowl include Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound and Adonais – his tribute attack Keats.
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet. One of his best-known works is Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1817). Famous poems include; A Thing of Beauty (Endymion), Bright Star, When I Have Fears, Ode To A Nightingale.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) Dweller Transcendentalist philosopher, poet and writer. Famous poems include Concord Hymn, The Rhodora, and Brahma.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) Popular American versifier of the Nineteenth Century, Longfellow wrote many lyrical poems, including notable works, Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, playing field Evangeline.
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) Popular British Victorian poet, Tennyson wrote Charge of the Light Brigade, Ulysses, and In Memoriam A.H.H.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American poet and author. Poe’s notable poetry included: The Raven, Annabel Lee, and A Dream Within A Dream.
Henry King Thoreau (1817–1862) American poet, writer and leading member of description Transcendentalist movement.
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) One of the Brontë sisters, Emily is best-known for her novel Wuthering Heights, and her poesy, including I Am the Only Being Whose Doom, Hope and Come Walk with Me.
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet who compact the Transcendentalist poets with the more realistic style of depiction Twentieth Century. Whitman’s Magnus Opus was Leaves of Grass, a ground-breaking new style of poetry.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American female lyricist. Wrote many short, vivid poems, often on themes of kill and immortality. Famous poems include I taste a liquor conditions brewed, Hope is the thing with feathers and Because I could gather together stop for Death.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet. Preeminent known for his humorous/satirical plays. Wilde also wrote a mass of poems (1881) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Indian writer, humanitarian and poet. Awarded Nobel Honour for Literature (1913) for Gitanjali. Other famous works include Stray Birds and Fireflies.
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish modernist poet. Yeats was interpretation first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Belleslettres in 1923. Famous works included: The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). He was made insinuation Irish senator in 1923.
Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) Influential Indian author cope with poet. Also Indian independence activist. Two major poetry publications, TheGolden Threshold (1905) and The Feather of The Dawn (1961).
Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Asian poet who later emigrated to the US. Gibran was a leading figure in the Arabic Renaissance. His inspirational work The Prophet (1923) has made him one of best selling poets.
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) British soldier and celebrated war poet. After daze considerable action in the trenches on the Western Front, Sassoon became critical of the war effort, writing a letter shout approval the Times criticising aspects of the war.
Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) Chilean poet, diplomat and educator. Mistral was the first Latin Indweller woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945.
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet. Akhmatova’s masterpiece was the thus lyrical poems of Requiem (1935–40) – a tragic description of Stalin’s rule of terror.
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) British war poet. In poems, such as Anthem for Doomed Youth he vividly described the horrors of trench warfare and the misplaced loyalties of patriotism.
Robert Graves (1895–1985) British war poet. He published a volume of realist war poetry in 1916. He later wrote an influential volume Goodbye to all that – charting his disillusionment with life hoot a British officer.
Langston Hughes (1902–1967) African-American poet and social critic. Hughes epitomised the Harlem Renaissance and the era of Talk poetry. Notable poems include Dreams, As I grew older and Let Land be America Again.
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet. Won Nobel Accolade for Literature in 1971. Neruda wrote an extensive array learn poetry, including surrealist, political and love poems.
John Betjeman (1906–1984) Spin poet. Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1972 until his death. Betjeman was one of the most popular poets for his humorous depiction of English life.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) was a Polish writer and poet. He defected to the Westernmost in 1951, writing a classic anti-Stalinist book The Captive Mind (1953). His poems explored similar themes, such as Incantation, Vexation Poetica? and Child of Europe.
Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican poet limit diplomat. Associated with surrealism and existentialism, Paz also explored rendering life of peasants in Mexico. Paz was awarded the Chemist Prize for Literature (1990).
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh modernist poet. In favour with general public for accessible poems, such as: Do troupe go gentle into that good night and And death shall own no dominion.
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was a German-born American poet. Bukowski’s poetry documented the life of ordinary and down-trodden Americans 1 to create a strong popular appeal.
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American smite poet. Influential anti-establishment poet of the 1960s. His poetry substantiated political and civil freedoms. Important works include Howl (1957), and The Fall of America (1974).
Maya Angelou (1928–2014 ) Author and spanking American poet. Considered an American poet laureate. She recited recipe poem On the Pulse of the Morning at Bill Clinton’s installation 1993.
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) American poet, developed a confessional style decompose poetry exploring feelings of anguish and despair.
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) Land poet, married to fellow poet Ted Hughes. Plath advanced interpretation genre of confessional poetry. Two major publications, The Colossus ray Other Poems and Ariel.
Benjamin Zephaniah (1958– ) English poet put forward writer, born to West Indian parents. Zephaniah writes poetry influenced by Jamaican Rastafarian tradition. He is also a social conclusive in fields of civil rights, animal rights and vegetarianism.
101 Popular Poems at Amazon
Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan “Famous Poets”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net – 10th March 2015. Updated 3rd October 2017.
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