Poets L-Z
Poets L-Z Encyclopedia Articles
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Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, is a landmark in the history of American literature. Walt Whitman was born into...
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley was the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The girl who was to be named Phillis Wheatley was captured in West Africa and taken to Boston by slave traders...
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied...
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. Neruda was the...
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare occupies a position unique in...
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was an English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884. Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into...
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet whose work is noted for its confessional intensity. Anne Harvey attended Garland Junior College for a year before her marriage in 1948 to Alfred M. Sexton II. She studied...
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, and autobiographer known for her passionate writings on lesbian feminism and racial issues. The daughter of Grenadan parents, Lorde attended Hunter College and...
Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was one of the most important of English women poets both in range and quality. She excelled in works of fantasy, in poems for children, and in religious poetry. Christina was the youngest...
Sappho
Sappho was a Greek lyric poet greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style. She ranks with Archilochus and Alcaeus, among Greek poets, for her ability to impress readers with a lively...
Ovid
Ovid was a Roman poet noted especially for his Ars amatoria and Metamorphoses. His verse had immense influence both by its imaginative interpretations of Classical myth and as an example of supreme technical...
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American poet whose work distilled moral and intellectual insights from the close and accurate observation of objective detail. Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English...
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was an American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American...
Pindar
Pindar was the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece and the master of epinicia, choral odes celebrating victories achieved in the Pythian, Olympic, Isthmian, and Nemean games. Pindar was of noble birth,...
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats’s father,...
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and dramatist who came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s. Millay was reared in Camden, Maine, by her divorced mother, who recognized...
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet in the 19th century, known for such works as The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863). Longfellow attended private schools...
Virgil
Virgil was a Roman poet, best known for his national epic, the Aeneid (from c. 30 bce; unfinished at his death). Virgil was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet, an estimation that subsequent...
Petrarch
Petrarch was an Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of...
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was an English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement. Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern...
