Poets

Homer was the ancient Greek poet and author of epic poems. Homer is considered one of the greatest world literary artists and profoundly influenced Western ideas and thought.

Chrétien de Troyes was a French medieval epic poet who wrote about heroic knights during the Arthurian era. His writing was some of the best of medieval literature. It included Erec and Enide, Lancelot, Perceval, and Yvain.

Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. It was a fantasy allegory celebrating the queen and the Tudor dynasty. Spenser is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.

Robert Burns was Scottish Poet and the national poet of Scotland. Also known as Rabbie Burns he is the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire and the Ploughman’s Poet.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher, a founding figure of a philosophical movement known as German idealism.

William Wordsworth was an English poet. He helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with poems like I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

Novalis was a German aristocrat. He was a poet, author, mystic, and philosopher of Early German Romanticism.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, philosopher, and theologian. He and his friend William Wordsworth founded the Romantic Movement in England.

Lord Byron, George Gordon Byron was the 6th Baron Byron. He was one of the greatest British poets and figures in the Romantic movement. Notorious and celebrated he scandalized society.

Alphonse de Lamartine is considered the first French romantic poet. His first collection of poetry Poetic Meditations made him famous.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. His second wife was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

John Keats was a Romantic English poet. Born in England to parents of meager means they both died by the time he was seven. London merchants became his guardians, apprenticing to an apothecary-surgeon. But he met a literary group of men who encouraged his poetry. Keats never married.

Alexander Pushkin was a Russian noble considered to be the greatest poet Russia has produced. A poet, playwright and Romantic era novelist he founded modern Russian literature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American poet and philosopher. He came from a long line of distinguished New England clergymen and began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston. He led the transcendentalist movement of the 19th century and defined transcendentalism as a belief system that espouses a nontraditional appreciation of nature.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet during the Victorian era Romantic Movement. She was the oldest of 12 children. Her father was rich and owned sugar plantations using slave labor in Jamaica. She was part Creole and a sickly child dosed with opium. Her health remained poor and she was addicted throughout her life.

Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson was an English poet, considered the embodiment of the era. He remains beloved for poems like the Charge of the Light Brigade. During the reign of Queen Victoria he was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland.

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. He was a leading transcendentalist known for his reflections on simple living in natural surroundings.

Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He was a humanist and used both transcendentalism and realism in his works. Whitman is often referred to as the father of free verse.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist and art critic who lived in Paris. His most famous work was Les Fleurs du mal, The Flowers of Evil in English. Baudelaire’s prose poetry influenced a whole generation of poets.

Emily Dickinson was an American poet little know during her lifetime. She is one of the most important figures in American poetry.

Stephane Mallarme was a French poet. His work inspired revolutionary artistic schools like Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.

Paul Marie Verlaine was a French poet, one of the best poets of his era. He helped revolutionize the way French poetry was written.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet & Jesuit priest, an innovative writer of verse. Hopkins work was recognized as some of the most original poetry of his century.

Ivan Yakovych Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy.

Guillaume Apollinaire was born in Rome, Italy, a leading poet in the avant-garde before World War I. Volunteering for his adopted country in World War I, he joined the French army.