Search

This article presents a biography of poet Sir John Betjeman. Never a disciple of modernism, Betjeman adopts the stance of entertainer on a search for faith, fighting despair, yet showing a deep love of the human comedy. Betjeman chooses traditional verse forms including rhymed quatrains, blank verse and couplets. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Marlborough College, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925, but he left without a degree.

This article profiles English poet George Crabbe. Crabbe's upbringing in Aldeburgh, his education in schools at Bungay and Stowmarket in Suffolk, England and his apprenticeship years to a village doctor were fundamental in that they supplied the poet with his most central subject matter--village life. He lived at Muston in Leicestershire from 1789 to 1814, and from about 1789 to 1806 he published little until the volume of Poems containing Sir Eustace Grey, The Parish Register, The Hall of Justice and other earlier poems. His most famous production is the 1810 volume The Borough: A Poem in Twenty-Four Letters, which begins with the General Description of the Aldeburgh-like east coast town and which develops satirically into accounts of social events and professions in that area.

This article profiles poet Thomas Chatterton of Bristol, England. The real Chatterton was the posthumous son of a schoolmaster father and was educated at Colston's Hospital in Bristol (1760-67) until the age of fourteen, when he became an apprentice to John Lambert, an attorney, from 1767 to 1770. Current critical opinion seeks to show the poet seeking or inventing paternal figures or engaging in acts of filial rebellion through the medium of his poetry. His poetical experiments among a wide variety of forms and styles certainly show the presence of poetical fathers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and major 18th-century figures such as Alexander Pope, Charles Churchill, John Dryden and Jonathan Swift.

This article presents a biographical information on the late writer John Drinkwater. He was educated in London, England and then at the City of Oxford High School. At age 15, he joined the Northern Assurance Company in Nottingham, England as the first in a series of jobs as well as pursuing his career on the stage. He demonstrated skills as an actor, dramatist, critic, and manager. His poetry has never achieved the status and acclaim of his fellows, but there has been recent revival of interest in the work, some of which has been set to music.

Profiles poet Geoffrey Hill. Highlights of academic career of Hill; Incorporation of mythology in the poems of Hill; Exploration of British social and political life in the collection of poems of Hill in the book "Canaan."

This article profiles poet Thomas Gray. He is characteristically portrayed as a transitional figure displaying the splendid polish of neoclassicism and straying willfully into subject areas and linguistic areas that were to become the predilections of the Romantic poets. In The Progress of Poesy, he describe forms of poetry in a progress from Greece to Italy to Britain, poetry's primitive origins and varying powers and poetry's connections with political liberty.

Profiles essayist William Hazlitt. Admiration of the essayist for the prose style of statesman and orator Edmund Burke; Titles of essays about politicians written by Hazlitt; Withdrawal from political journalism in favor of a concentration upon art, literature and travel writing; Contributions of Hazlitt to the "London Magazine."

The article presents information on the life and works of English author Charles Lamb. Lamb was born a Londoner and remained so for all his life with a few forays outside the city. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, London, England where he initiated his relationship with the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His literary output includes poetry, drama, essays, sketches, a novel, writing for children--and his letters that show his lively and mischievous nature. He edited the volume Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, which coupled with his other writings on William Shakespeare for Hunt's Examiner and the Reflector, helped considerably in the rehabilitation of much neglected but key figures in the history of English drama.

Profiles English poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah. People who greatly influenced his work and thought; Background on Zephaniah as a performer; Information on his novel "Face."

This article profiles the late author William Henry Davies. Davies' work has endured the change in poetical fashion and practice that characterized the first half of the 20th century and chastened the ideas of the second half. His belief in the near inescapable connection between a poet's life and his writing is at times painfully apparent as the reader moves through a literary landscape of near-visionary joys or encounters the varieties of more singular human experience.