Category Great Poets

               P.B. Shelley wrote great poetry, but fame bypassed him during his lifetime.

               Shelley was born on August 4, 1792 in Sussex. He was the first born of Timothy and Elizabeth Pilfold. He attended Syon House Academy in 1802. Shelley had to face physical and mental bullying as a student at Eton in 1804. The poet coped by escaping into the world of imagination, and by resorting to literary pranks.

               Shelley wrote many poems which have stood the test of time, and are masterpieces. Some among them are ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘To a Skylark’, and ‘The Masque of Anarchy’. ‘Prometheus Unbound’, a long visionary poem, is regarded as his magnum opus. This book was published in 1820.

               He also wrote an innovative verse drama titled ‘The Cenci’. ‘Hellas: A Lyrical Drama’, was published in 1822. ‘The Triumph of Life’, was cut short by his death. On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan.

               Today, Shelley is regarded as one of the great lyric poets in the English language. 

            “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, wrote John Keats. Keats penned poems of lasting beauty. ‘I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill’, and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, are among his great works. ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, is his most celebrated sonnet. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, is his most widely known poem.

            The odes of Keats were remarkable in their own right. ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, are his outstanding odes. Each ode was a poetic meditation on a chosen subject. ‘To Autumn’, was written in September, 1819. The other odes were created between the months of March and June in the same year.

            The use of legend and striking imagery are features of his poetry. Keats’ first published book was ‘Poems 1817’.

            Keats was born on October 31st 1795, in London. A licensed apothecary, Keats chose to write poetry. His choice was proved right only after his death. Tuberculosis took his life on 23rd February, 1821 and he was buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. John Keats was only twenty five at the time of his death.

            By the end of the 19th century, Keats is recognized as a prominent, and one of the most adored poets of all time.

            Alexander Pushkin was a legendary Russian writer. He came from a noble family.

            Pushkin was a prolific writer. He left his mark on lyric poetry, narrative poetry, novel, short story, drama, and critical essay.

            Pushkin was born in Moscow on June 6th, 1799. His first poem was printed at the age of fifteen. ‘Ruslan and Ludmila’, was his long poem published in 1820, which ran into controversy. The subject and style of this poem were debated.

            His poem, ‘The Bronze Horseman’, was hailed by critics as a great work. So were ‘The Stone Guest’, and ‘Eugene Onegin’. His collections of short stories, ‘The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin’, were widely appreciated.

            Pushkin is credited with the introduction of European literary genres to Russia. He also made quite a few European writers known to Russian readers. Pushkin brought natural conversation and borrowed elements from the literature of other lands to create modern poetic Russian.

            Alexander Pushkin is regarded as the greatest Russian poet, and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin passed away in 1837. 

               Victor Hugo’s achievements as a poet were largely overshadowed by the greatness of his novels. Hugo was born to Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trebuchet in 1802.

               His first book of poems, ‘Odes et poesies diverses’ was published in 1822. The poems were pro-royalist, and this prompted Louis XVIII to award him a pension. The poems are in a classical form. Hugo’s unique style and imagination can be detected in these poems.

               His most touching poem and perhaps his most famous one is ‘Demain, des l’aube’. In the poem, Hugo narrates his visit to the grave of his daughter who died at the age of nineteen. Hugo also published ‘Odes et ballades’, a collection of odes previously printed. Hugo penned a number of other well known poems.

               Hugo’s popularity reached its height after the publication of his novels, ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’, and ‘Les Miserables’. Hugo succumbed to pneumonia, and died on 22nd May 1885.

               Victor Hugo was the most influential of the French writers and one of the greatest literary figures of all time.

             Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote memorable love poems.

             Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806. Her collection ‘An Essay on Mind with Other Poems’, appeared in 1826, when she was twenty.

             The poem ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ made her famous. ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, is another of her major work. She also wrote ‘Aurora Leigh’. ‘Aurora Leigh’, is now regarded as one of the early feminist texts.

             She was acquainted with Robert Browning, another great poet through frequent letters, and later, they got married. Elizabeth’s wedding did not go down well with her father, and he disinherited her.

             The poet couple moved to Pisa. There, she attacked slavery in the United States by writing ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Elizabeth Browning passed away in 1861. Elizabeth Browning’s work influenced Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, her contemporaries.

               Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet of the nineteenth century. Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, and Charles Baudelaire admired his poetry. He was the first American to translate ‘The Divine Comedy’, of Dante Alighieri.

               He was the most famous American poet of his day and age. Longfellow was born on February 27th, 1807. Following his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825, Longfellow worked in Europe and the United States.

               ‘Voices of the Night’, his first collection of poems, was printed in 1839. Ballads and Other Poems followed in 1842.

               Many of these poems were inspirational, and spoke of people over-coming heavy odds. ‘A Psalm of Life’, is a typical poem of this kind. His poems were welcomed by many.

               In 1854, Longfellow made a permanent break with teaching to write more poetry. ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, a long poem, and ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ and other poems followed.

               Henry Longfellow’s seventy-fifth birthday, in 1882, was celebrated throughout the United States. Longfellow passed away on the 24th of March that year. 

               Lord Alfred Tennyson holds a poetic record. He was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland for the longest period.

               In 1850, he succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, and remained so for 42 years until his death. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s rule.

               Lord Byron was a major influence on Lord Tennyson. ‘Break, Break, Break’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, and ‘Crossing the Bar’, are brilliant short lyrics written by Tennyson. ‘Idylls of the King’, ‘Ulysses’, and ‘Tithonus’, penned by Tennyson are prime examples of blank verse.

               In 1832 Tennyson published another volume of his poems including ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘The Palace of Art’, and ‘The Lady of Shalott’. ‘The Lady of Shalott’, is an evergreen poem penned by Tennyson. However, Tennyson’s plays were failures. In 1847, he published ‘The Princess: A Medley’, a popular satire on women’s education. ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’, published in 1850, is the magnum opus of Lord Alfred Tennyson. Lord Tennyson passed away in 1892. 

               Edgar Allan Poe was the inventor of detective fiction and a writer of great poetry. He wrote ‘The Raven’, which became a milestone in American poetry. Poe is a key figure of American Romanticism.

               Poe was born on January 19th, 1809. Both his parents were actors. His mother Elizabeth Arnold Poe was English by birth while his father David Poe was from Baltimore. Poe studied in the University of Virginia for eleven months before dropping out.

               ‘Al Aaraaf’, ‘Tamerlane; and Minor Poems’, a collection of his poetry, was published in 1829 at Baltimore.

               Poe was a distinguished short story writer. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, are some of his famous stories.

               Poe’s works exerted a huge influence on American literature. The Edgar Award is an annual award instituted by The Mystery Writers of America to honour the author of the best tale of mystery.

               Edgar Allan Poe passed away in 1849.

               Robert Browning was a great philosopher-poet. The poetry of Browning is note-worthy for its social commentary. Browning had little formal education, but the vocabulary and syntax of his poems are of a high standard. Historical settings, characterization, dark humour and irony are other interesting features of his poetry.

               Browning was born on 7th May 1812. His first published work, ‘Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession’, was a dramatic monologue. ‘Paracelsus’ was another of his widely appreciated work. He followed it up with ‘Sordello’, ‘Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, a poem’.

               His important work, ‘Men and Women’, was published before the death of his wife, legendary poet, Elizabeth Browning in 1861. The collection ‘Dramatis Personae’, and the book-length epic poem ‘The Ring and the Book’, established his reputation as a prominent British poet. Browning passed away in 1889.

               Henry David Thoreau was an illustrious poet and essayist who lived close to nature. Thoreau and his group of writers believed in transcendentalism which stresses the superiority of the spiritual matters over the physical world.

               Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Massachusetts. He studied Greek, Latin, and German at Harvard. Thoreau struck up a friendship with Emerson in Harvard. He became a professional poet in the early 1840s.

               He began to write nature poetry in 1840s under the guidance of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. ‘Walden; or, Life in the Woods’, published in 1854, was his magnum opus. The book is considered as one of the great works of world literature.

               The transcendentalists started a magazine named The Dial with Emerson as a guiding force. Thoreau’s poems ‘Sympathy’, ‘To the Maiden in the East’, and his essay on the Roman poet ‘Aulus Persius Flaccus’, appeared in the inaugural issue published in July 1840.

               An essay by Thoreau titled ‘Natural History of Massachusetts’ was also published in The Dial. The last issue of The Dial came out in April 1844. Henry Thoreau passed away in 1862.