Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Heaney was born in a small agricultural town in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland to a Catholic farmer and his wife. In 1957 he went to Belfast to study literature at Queen's University, where he returned as a lecturer in 1965.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in rural Ottery saint Mary Devonshire in 1772. He is considered to be the great romantic poet who was precociously dreamy, imaginative, enthusiastic and eloquent even as a schoolboy. Attending Jesus College, Cambridge, as an already well-read scholar, at the age of nineteen, he found little that intellectually stimulated him there, and became a dull, dissolute and dissatisfied student; as a young man (in debt) he escaped and joined the army! He was forced back to college, but he never took any degree anyway.
Rita Dove is an American writer who served as poet laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She was the first African American writer to become poet laureate. Born in Akron, Ohio, Dove graduated from Miami University in Ohio in 1973 and from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977. She taught at Arizona State University of Virginia. Much of Dove’s work concentrates on revealing the beauty and significance of everyday events in ordinary lives.
Robert Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. He was educated at Rutgers University and Stanford University, where he studied under the poet Yvor Winters and earned a Ph.D. He has taught at Wellesley College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Boston University, and has served as poetry editor of The New Republic.
Robert Creeley is a well-known American poet, who is best known for his association with the influential Black Mountain Poets. The group was centered at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, during the 1950s. Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. After completing his college preparatory studies at Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, he attended Harvard University.
Robert Burns (1759-1796) was born in Scotland. The son of a poor farmer, Burns became Scotland’s national poet. At his father’s death in 1784 he continued farming in partnership with his brother.
Robert Browning one of the major poets of the Victorian Age was born in a rich family in London. He chose poetry as his vocation; but his early poems attracted little attention. In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett and went to live with her in Italy, where he wrote most of his great poems.
Ray Young Bear (born in 1950) is an American and Indian poet and novelist. He was born and raised on the Tama Indian Reservation in Iowa, in the Mesquaki tribe, where his grandmother instructed him in the stories and traditions of his people. He started his writing career after he attended his college in the 1960s.
Randall Jarrell is an American poet, who was noted for his acerbic, witty, and erudite criticism. But though he was best known as a literary critic, he was also respected as a poet. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he earned bachelors and master’s degree from Vanderbilt University. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at Kenyon College, where he met the critic John Crowe Ransom and poet Robert Lowell, and then at the University of Texas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is an American poet, essayist and a leader of the philosophical movement of transcendentalism. Influenced by such schools of thought as English romanticism, Neo-Platonism, and Hindu philosophy, Emerson is noted for his skill in presenting his ideas eloquently and in poetic language.