FAMOUS POETS

FAMOUS POETS

BLOG SESSION

December 11th, 2017

Good Afternoon Blog Readers, Followers, Poets, Poetry Lovers & Visitors ~ We are back for another great Blog Session about Famous Poets!

Today's Blog Session will shed light on some Famous Poets.  If you are a Poet, or a poetry lover, you'll need to grab your Journal to take notes.

Can you imagine a time back in the day when there was a certain Poet that amazed poetry readers with his poetics, and still does to this day?  Take a look at who this man is . . .

Edgar Allan Poe

January 19, 1809 - October 07, 1849

(Died at age 40)

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic.  Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre.  He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.  He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

FAMOUS LITERARY WORKS:

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (published 1845) Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. [Excerpt]

Alfred Lord Tennyson

1809 - 1892

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (In Memoriam A.H.H.), "Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all", "Theirs is not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten,/Because my heart is pure", "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new".

Alfred Lord Tennyson is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Oscar Wilde

Born October 16, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland

Died November 30, 1900 in Paris, France

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright.  After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.  He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.

Oscar Wilde was a Poet and a Dramatist whose reputation rests on his only Novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891),  and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).  He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art's sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895-97).

Wilde was born of professional and literary parents.  His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift.  His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.

In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work.  In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction.  Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending.  Intentions (1891), consisting of previously published essays, restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler.  In the same year, two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates.

T. S. Eliot

Born September 26,1888

Died January 4, 1965

(Died at age 76)

Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets".  He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there.  He eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American citizenship.

• Awards:  Nobel Prize in Literature (1948); Tony Award for Best Play (1950); Tony Award for Best Original Score (1983); Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (1983); Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical (1981); Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Broadway Musical (1983); Outer Critics Award for Best Play (1950)

Movies:  Cats ~ Murder in the Cathedral ~ The Waste Land

OUR NEXT BLOG SESSION:

MORE FAMOUS POETS!

When we come back,

get ready to learn more

inspirational information

for the Poet in you!

Peace, Love & Light

By René Allen

©Copyright - René Allen - 2014-2017 - All Rights Reserved