Dylan Thomas wrote some of the best-known and best-loved poems of the twentieth century, amongst them ‘Do not go gentle into that...

Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty...

William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French...

Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of...

Shakespeare's sonnets have an intensity of both feeling and meaning unmatched in English sonnet form. They divide into two parts;...

'What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth' So wrote the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in 1817. This collection...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet...

Wilde, glamorous and notorius, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an...

William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets. His...

Initially a vivacious, outgoing person, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) progressively withdrew into a reclusive existence. An...

With an Introduction and Bibliography by Stephen Matterson, Trinity College, Dublin.
Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of...

'I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be'. wrote Byron (1788-1824) in his comic masterpiece Don Juan,...

During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of...

W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist...

Robert Burns, the most celebrated of all Scottish poets, is remembered with great devotion - his birthday on 25th January...