Edith Matilda Thomas (August 12, 1854 – September 13, 1925) was an American poet who "was one of the first poets to capture successfully the excitement of the modern city."
This poem taken from the The Little Book of Modern Verse. 1917.; Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed. (1869–1948) - Summary by Wikipedia
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This year's Hollowe'en offering is an eerie tale by Walter de La Mare. ( David Lawrence )
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Her death was tragic. Full of the desire of life she yet was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished. Her last year was spent in exile at
Saranac Lake. From her window she looked down on the graveyard — "Trudeau's Garden," she called it, with grim-gay irony. from the forward to Verse, by Claude Bragdon - Summary by from the forward to Verse,by Claude Bragdon
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Reprinted from Scribner’s Magazine for June, 1904, in an edition of forty copies for private distribution, by the courtesy of Charles Scribner’s Sons (from the forward)
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This poem tells the story of a boy in Australia who leaves the farm at harvest time. "and to run from home was a crime."
The story is set in the Riverina, New South Wales in the town of Gundagai. ( David Lawrence)
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Ringgold Wilmer "Ring" Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage, and the theatre. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom professed strong admiration for Lardner's writing. - Summary by Wikipedia
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A tribute to the autumn season, taken from THE COMING OF THE PRINCESS, AND OTHER POEMS (1881) - Summary by David Lawrence
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Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ was an English poet, Catholic and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody (particularly his invention of sprung rhythm and use of imagery) established him as an innovative writer of verse. Two of his major themes were nature and religion. ( Wikipedia)
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John George Edward Henry Douglas Sutherland Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll, usually better known by the courtesy title Marquess of Lorne, by which he was known between 1847 and 1900, was a British nobleman and was the fourth Governor General of Canada from 1878 to 1883. He is now remembered primarily for the place names bestowed on Canadian geography in honour of his wife. For ten years before coming to Canada. Lorne traveled throughout North and Central America, writing travel literature and poetry. - Summary by Wikipedia
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"This author's verse shows a hearty, wholesome, human spirit, sometimes overflowing into downright fun, and a straightforward directness always. It is a pleasant book, sure to be welcomed by all." (EXTRACTS FROM PRESS NOTICES OF A FORMER VOLUME.)
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American author and poet. Her best-known work was Poems of Passion. Her most enduring work was "Solitude", which contains the lines "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone". - Summary by Wikipedia
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Edith Matilda Thomas was an American poet who "was one of the first poets to capture successfully the excitement of the modern city. (Wikipedia)
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Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was a British author, poet, journalist and friend of royalty. Thomas was a humanitarian who frequently wrote in his poems about the impoverished and sick and unemployed, especially caring about returned soldiers in the First World War. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Virna Stanton was born in Cobourg, Ontario, the daughter of Elizabeth Butler Stanton and Eldridge Stanton, a photographer. Her brother Eldridge Stanton Jr. and his wife both died at Niagara Falls, in the Ice Bridge Disaster of 1912.
She published both novels and poetry collections during her life. Her papers were destroyed by her family after her death, apparently because they disapproved of her literary work. - Summary by Wikipedia
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William Henry Rhodes will long be remembered by his contemporaries at the Bar of California as a man of rare genius, exemplary habits, high honor, and gentle manners, with wit and humor unexcelled. His writings are illumined by powerful fancy, scientific knowledge, and a reasoning power which gave to his most weird imaginations the similitude of truth and the apparel of facts. W.H.L.B. (from the In Memoriam of the book)
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Browning, when at his best in vigor, clearness, and beauty, is peculiarly a poet for young people. His freedom from sentimentality, his liveliness of conception and narration, his high optimism, and his interest in the things that make for the life of the soul, appeal to the imagination and the feelings of youth. - TEACHERS' COLLEGE, NEW YORK, July, 1899. (from the Preface to Browning's Shorter Poems)
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This Weekly Poem is taken from Flame and Shadow, Copyright, 1920 by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. - Summary by David Lawrence
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria.
Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Francis William Lauderdale Adams was an essayist, poet, dramatist, novelist and journalist who produced a large volume of work in his short life.
A self-professed 'Child of his Age', Adams combined in his life and work many distinctive features of both fin de siècle British culture and the Australian radical nationalism of the 1890s, including a strong sympathy with socialist and feminist movements. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell was an English writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet.
Preludes (1875) was her first poetry collection, illustrated by her elder sister Elizabeth (the artist Lady Elizabeth Butler, 1846–1933, whose husband was Sir William Francis Butler). The work was warmly praised by Ruskin, although it received little public notice. Ruskin especially singled out the sonnet "Renunciation" for its beauty and delicacy. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Henry Kendall was the first Australian poet to draw his inspiration from the life, scenery and traditions of the country. In the beginnings of Australian poetry the names of two other men stand with his—Adam Lindsay Gordon, of English parentage and education, and Charles Harpur, born in Australia a generation earlier than Kendall. Harpur's work, though lacking vitality, shows fitful gleams of poetic fire suggestive of greater achievement had the circumstances of his life been more favourable. Kendall, whose lot was scarcely more fortunate, is a true singer; his songs remain, and are likely long to remain, attractive to poetry lovers. - Summary by from the Biographical Note of Poems of Henry Kendall
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This book .... contains the record of a short life, into which was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspiration—of the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul—than it is given to most men, even of high vitality, to extract from a life of twice the length.
Alan Seeger had barely passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when, charging up to the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, his "escouade" of the Foreign Legion was caught in a deadly flurry of machine-gun fire, and he fell, with most of his comrades, ... To his friends the loss was grievous, to literature it was—we shall never know how great, but assuredly not small. (Introduction by William Archer to Poems by Alan Seeger.)
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Our Valentine Poem is by Arthur William Symons, a British poet, critic and magazine editor., taken from his collection Silhouettes (1896). - Summary by David Lawrence
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William Henry Giles Kingston, often credited as W. H. G. Kingston, was an English writer of boys' adventure novels. He was a zealous volunteer and worked actively for the improvement of the condition of seamen. But from 1850, his chief occupation was writing books for boys, or editing boys' annuals and weekly periodicals. He started the Union Jack, a paper for boys, only a few months before his death. His stories number more than a hundred. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Ringgold Wilmer "Ring" Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage, and the theatre. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom professed strong admiration for Lardner's writing. ( Wikipedia )
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This LIbriVox Weekly Poem is taken from The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume II, New World Idylls and Poems of Love (1901) - Summary by David Lawrence
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American author and poet. Her best-known work was Poems of Passion. Her most enduring work was "Solitude", which contains the lines "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone". Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death.
This LibriVox Fortnightly Poem is taken from Poems of Purpose (1919) - Summary by Wikipedia
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Dora Maria Sigerson Shorter was an Irish poet and sculptor, who after her marriage in 1895 wrote under the name Dora Sigerson Shorter. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson was a Norwegian writer who received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Literature "as a tribute to his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit", becoming the first Norwegian Nobel laureate. Bjørnson is considered to be one of The Four Greats (De Fire Store) among Norwegian writers, the others being Henrik Ibsen, Jonas Lie, and Alexander Kielland. Bjørnson is also celebrated for his lyrics to the Norwegian National Anthem, - Summary by Wikipedia
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from THE POETICAL WORKS OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES:
TO MY READERS
NAY, blame me not; I might have spared
Your patience many a trivial verse,
Yet these my earlier welcome shared,
So, let the better shield the worse.
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It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to mention Mr. Lindsay's loyalty to the people of his place and hour, or the training in sympathy with their aims and ideals which he has achieved through vagabondish wanderings in the Middle West. And we may permit time to decide how far he expresses their emotion. But it may be opportune to emphasize his plea for poetry as a song art, an art appealing to the ear rather than the eye. THE CONGO AND OTHER POEMS; Introduction by Harriet Monroe (1860 - 1936)
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Despite the bittersweet outcome of the romance in this work, the poem still manages to conclude in an uplifting fashion. - Summary by SonOfTheExiles
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Joseph Horatio Chant was born at Stoke Underham, Somersetshire, England. His parents moved to Canada in 1840, and settled in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Chant attended schools in the area and upon graduation taught for two years in Cathcart, Burford township. In 1864 he attended Victoria College and entered the ministry, being ordained in 1868. - Summary by David Lawrence
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His verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. (From the introduction to FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK by Francis Turner Palgrave; Dec. 1876)
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This poem about a child's inquisitiveness, follows the short story The Elephant's Child in Rudyard KIpling's Just So Stories. (1902) - Summary by David Lawrence
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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an African-American abolitionist, suffragist, poet and author. She was also active in other types of social reform and was a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which advocated the federal government taking a role in progressive reform. - Summary by Wikipedia
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Not all of the English poets laureate have been the greatest masters of verse. Alfred Austin, who assumed this post after Alfred Lord Tennyson, was one of the less distinguished - if more prolific - late Victorian poets. In modern times, his verse has become celebrated not for its smooth earnestness, but rather for the occasional howlers it contains. A notable example is this song from his pastoral epic Fortunatus the Pessimist, the final couplet of which is a popular favourite in anthologies of bad verse. - Summary by Algy Pug
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This short tribute to April and the coming of Spring) is taken from The Miracle, and Other Poems by Virna Sheard (1913) - Summary by David Lawrence
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Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for the fourteen comic operas (known as the Savoy operas) produced in collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado.
Gilbert's creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, and numerous short stories, poems and lyrics, both comic and serious. After brief careers as a government clerk and a lawyer, Gilbert began to focus, in the 1860s, on writing light verse, including his Bab Ballads, short stories, theatre reviews and illustrations, often for Fun magazine. ( Wikipedia)
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer and statesman. His works include four novels; epic and lyric poetry; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. In addition, there are numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him extant. (Wikipedia)
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In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs. It was "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society"; however, the sponsoring organization now lists it as the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (inaugurated 1922). - Summary by Wikipedia
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Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
When Browning died in 1889, he was regarded as a sage and philosopher-poet who through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive. Such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century. ( Wikipedia )
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Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody (particularly his concept of sprung rhythm and use of imagery) established him as an innovative writer of verse. Two of his major themes were nature and religion.
- Summary by Wikipedia
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Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. The classical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of the noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preserved the ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as a sign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot be denied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. (from Old and New Masters (1919) by Robert Lynd; Ch 9 - James Elroy Flecker )
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In the Author's Preface to Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, he describes this poem as Curtal-Sonnet "that is they are constructed in proportions resembling those of the sonnet proper, namely 6 + 4 instead of 8 + 6, with however a halfline tailpiece (so that the equation is rather 12/8 + 9/2 = 21/2 + 10 1/2)." - Summary by Wikipedia
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"The Haunted Palace" originally issued in the Baltimore American Museum for April, 1888, was subsequently embodied in that much admired tale, "The Fall of the House of Usher," and published in it in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine for September, 1839. It reappeared in that as a separate poem in the 1845 edition of Poe's poems.
(Note on The Haunted House from The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe)
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Michael Field was a pseudonym used for the poetry and verse drama of Katharine Harris Bradley (27 October 1846 – 26 September 1914) and her niece and ward Edith Emma Cooper (12 January 1862 – 13 December 1913). As Field they wrote around 40 works together, and a long journal Works and Days. Their intention was to keep the pen-name secret, but it became public knowledge, not long after they had confided in their friend Robert Browning.
They wrote a number of passionate love poems to each other, and their name Michael Field was their way of declaring their inseparable oneness. Friends referred to them as the Fields, the Michaels or the Michael Fields. They had a range of pet names for each other. They also were passionately devoted to their pets, in particular a dog named Whym Chow, for whom they wrote a book of poems named after him. - Summary by Wikipedia
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This little poem, with it's masterful choice of heavy-laden words, and great alliteration that sounds like a drumbeat, or a heartbeat, and rolls off the tongue, conveys much horror in a very few words. Longfellow wrote poetry like John Singer Sargent painted portraits, with "economy of stroke", and this poem shows Longfellow's familiarity with and sympathy for the slavery issues of his day, and the ghastly contrast between nature's beauty and man-made hell. A contemporary of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), both used their literary art to raise consciousness of this intolerable practice. (Michele Fry)
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Her final words in her autobiography The Worlds and I: "From this mighty storehouse (of God, and the hierarchies of Spiritual Beings) we may gather wisdom and knowledge, and receive light and power, as we pass through this preparatory room of earth, which is only one of the innumerable mansions in our Father's house. Think on these things". - Summary by Wikipedia
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Harold Edward Monro was an English poet born in Brussels and proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London, which helped many poets bring their work before the public.
In his later years, Monro reflected on whether the Poetry Bookshop had fulfilled its purpose and whether it should be closed, but he was too deeply attached to it. According to the English literary historian Dominic Hibberd, "By now Monro was a disappointed man, appalled at the state of Europe and feeling forgotten by the poets he had helped." He had used up most of his money in subsidizing the shop. - Summary by Wikipedia
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