Geoffrey Chaucer (1342?-1400)
We know more about Chaucer's life than we do about Shakespeare's, because he had a public career so there are many mentions of him in official records of the time. However, little is known of his early life apart from a few official records. His family were wine-merchants who lived in London, and Chaucer was probably educated at St Paul's Almonry.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets of the 19th Century, was born in December 1830, into a family of poets and artists. Devoutly religious, she refused two offers of marriage because of religious differences. Much of her poetry is religious, though she wrote some passionate love-poetry and much which celebrates the joy of the natural world. She also wrote a book of rhymes for very young children. She was close to her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was linked through him with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art. After his death, she lived a secluded life. She died of cancer in December 1894.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
Sir Thomas Wyatt was born at Allington Castle, near Maidstone in Kent, though his family was originally from Yorkshire. His father, Henry Wyatt, had been one of Henry VII's Privy Councillors and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. In his turn, Thomas Wyatt followed his father to court after his education at St John's College, Cambridge.

Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599)
The Elizabethans did not keep systematic records of births, but Spenser is thought to have been born in London. He is thought to have been the eldest son of John Spenser, who was probably related to the Spencer family of Althorp from which the Princess of Wales descended. Although the family was not wealthy, they had good connections to wealthy families and Spenser may have been partly sponsored or supported by family friends. Spenser's father made a living in cloth-making, and Spenser was one of the first group of pupils at Merchant Taylor's school in 1561, which had been founded to educate the sons of men working in this business.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
We know very little detail about Shakespeare's life. Records at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, tell us he was baptised there on April 26th 1564, but we do not know his birthday, though in those days children were usually baptised within a few days of their birth. He was the third of eight children, though the two born before him had died. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove-maker and a wool-trader, and may have been a money-lender. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a Roman Catholic farmer. The family lived in Henley Street, Stratford.

John Donne (1572-1631)
John Donne was born in London, sometime in the first six months of 1572. Birth records were not always kept carefully in Elizabethan times, so we cannot be sure. He was the third of six children of an ironmonger. His mother was a Catholic; her family was related to Sir Thomas More, and they had to some extent suffered persecution for their faith.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Robert Herrick was born in London, the fourth son of a goldsmith. His father committed suicide when he was very young, and his uncle, Sir William Herrick, became his guardian and brought him up. When he was sixteen, he became an apprentice goldsmith with his uncle, but did not complete his apprenticeship. Instead, his uncle supported him while he studied from 1613 at Cambridge University. Letters he wrote home, like most students, asking for money from his father's estate, still survive.

George Herbert (1593-1633)
George Herbert was born in Montgomeryshire in Wales. His family was well-educated and aristocratic, related to the Earl of Pembroke. John Donne dedicated his Holy Sonnets to Magdalene Herbert, George's mother, and George too became a personal friend of Donne's. George's elder brother Edward became ambassador to France, and also wrote both poetry and an autobiography.

John Milton (1608-1674)
John Milton's father (also called John) was a wealthy man whose business involved drafting contracts and acting as a financial agent. However, he was also a gifted amateur composer. Later, Milton claimed that his father had destined him from childhood to 'the pursuits of literature'. Milton was born in London, and educated at St Paul's School there. His education was unusual for the period, because his headmaster taught the English language and the works of English poets as well as Latin and Greek. He also had private lessons in Hebrew, and in later life when he was blind he liked to have the Bible read to him in the original Hebrew.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
In his lifetime, Marvell was probably better known as a politician than as a poet. For the last nineteen years of his life, he was MP for Hull, his home city. The city had been strongly on the side of Parliament during the Civil War, and Marvell's political sympathies lay that way too. After the monarchy was restored in 1661, he wrote several bitter satires about its corruption.

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)
Henry Vaughan was born in Wales, and lived most of his life there, except for a few years after 1638. His twin brother Thomas is known to have begun his studies at Jesus College, Oxford, in that year, and Henry is thought to have gone with him, though there is no record of him there. In 1540, he moved to London to study law, and returned to Wales two years later as secretary to Judge Lloyd.

John Dryden (1631-1700)
Dryden was born into a Puritan family in Northamptonshire and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In about 1657, he is thought to have gone to London as clerk to his cousin, Cromwell's chamberlain. His first important poem was written in memory of Cromwell, but after the Restoration he wrote poems celebrating the return of Charles II and was rewarded by being made Poet Laureate in 1668 and Historiographer Royal in 1670.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Alexander Pope was born in London, the son of a Roman Catholic tradesman in the linen business. After the Protestant William III became king a new law prohibited Catholics from living within ten miles of London, so in 1700 the family left London to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. Catholics were also barred from attending Protestant universities, and so Pope was educated mainly at home. He had some lessons from priests, but taught himself Greek, picked up French and Italian, and read widely in English and Latin poetry.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
Thomas Gray was born in London, the son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of eight children and the only child in his family to survive infancy. Gray's family was not particularly wealthy, but when he was nine, he was able to go to Eton College, where his uncle was one of the masters. He recalled his schooldays as a time of great happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and naturally scholarly boy who spent his time reading great literature and avoiding athletics. Probably fortunately for himself, he was able to live in his uncle's household rather than in college. He made three close friends: Horace Walpole, son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Thomas Ashton and Richard West. The four of them prided themselves on their sense of style, their sense of humour and their appreciation of beauty.

William Blake (1757-1827)
William Blake was born in London and lived there most of his life. The city dominates many of his poems, either as a Nightmare (as in the poem Londonin Songs of Experience) or a vision. Place names in and around London appear frequently throughout his poems.

Robert Burns (1759-1796)
On January 25th Scots all over the world celebrate Burns Night. Reels are danced, whisky drunk, and a toast solemnly made to the haggis, 'Fair chieftain of the pudding race', and to 'The Immortal Memory'.

Even people who do not read poetry know some of Burns' songs. Who has never sung Auld Lang Syne on New Years Eve? Who does not know at least some of the words to My love is like a red, red rose, or Charlie is my darling? All were written by Burns for two collections of Scottish songs. He took traditional folk songs and either wrote new words or adapted old ones, touching them with his own genius. Yet it would be a shame to limit our appreciation of Burns to his songs alone. His life and work has far more to offer.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, Wordsworth was one of the great English poets. He was a founder of the Romantic movement in English poetry. Together with his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge he wrote <Lyrical Ballads (1798), which tried to use the language of ordinary people in poetry. This volume became a manifesto for Romantic poets, especially after the second edition in 1800 included a preface outlining Wordsworth's poetic theories. With his sister Dorothy, and from 1802 his wife and family, he lived in the Lake District for the last 50 years of his life. By 1843 he was justly famous and became Poet Laureate, but by that time he had very little creative output. His fame rests mainly on poetry written between 1797 and 1815.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
English poet, critic and philosopher. Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, the son of a clergyman. His works include Poems on Various Subjects (1796), Lyrical Ballads (1798, together with Wordsworth) which includes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the conversation poems Fears in Solitude, Frost at Midnight, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and The Nightingale. One of his most popular works is Kubla Khan (1797-8), based on a dream induced by taking laudanum, about which he wrote Dejection: an Ode (1902). His first book of collected poems was Sibylline Leaves (1817). His major work the Biographia Literaria is an influential summary of his theories of poetry and criticism. He also wrote religious and philosophical works. Along with Wordsworth, Coleridge helped found of the Romantic Movement in poetry, which also includes Keats and Byron.

George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Byron, a contemporary of Shelley and Keats, is one of the most famous of the Romantic poets. This was partly because of his looks, personality, aristocratic background and family wealth as well as the literary talent which helped him conquer women all over London society. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know as one notorious lover, Caroline Lamb, described him, he and the characters he described in his poems and plays (often modelled on his own personality) became the model of a hundred romantic heroes of later novels.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley was born in Warnham, in Sussex. His family were landed gentry: his father was a Member of Parliament, and his grandfather a rich baronet. Ironically, considering his later radical political opinions, he had a very privileged upbringing. Although his father funded the publication of poetry by Shelley and his sister while he was still in his teens, his parents disapproved of both his opinions and his poetry when he was an adult. After Shelley died, his father opposed the publication of his works.

John Clare (1793-1864)
John Clare was born in Helpstone, Northamptonshire, into a family of poor agricultural labourers. His parents were not well-educated themselves, but when he was five they sent him to a dame school – a village school which gave a basic primary education for infants – for two years, and then to another school at Glinton church until he was about twelve. Unusually for a time when education was not thought important for working-class children, Clare became a keen reader early in life, particularly of poems.

John Keats (1795 - 1821)
English Romantic lyric poet, one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. Other Romantic poets include Coleridge, Wordsworth and Blake. His first volume was published in 1817 and included On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer and Sleep and Poetry. Endymion followed in 1818 but was not well received by critics. Many of his best-known poems were written between 1818 and 1819 and published in a volume in 1820. These include The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the great odes - Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn. His letters have also come to be considered as part of his works.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Elizabeth Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham. She was the eldest of eleven children, and her father's favourite. At first her family was very well-off, though her father's fortunes declined later, and her childhood on their country estate at Hope End near the Malvern Hills in Gloucestershire was idyllic. She was educated at home, read very widely in both the classics and the great writers of English literature, and learned Greek, Latin and Hebrew when she was very young.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson ( 1809-1892)
Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire. He was the fourth of twelve children of a country clergymen, though an elder brother had already died as a baby. His father was the eldest son of a wealthy family, but because he had fallen out with his own father, the family money passed to Tennyson's uncle. Although he struggled financially, he had a large collection of books by great authors, and all the children were encouraged to read widely. Tennyson was unhappy at school, and after the age of eleven was largely educated at home.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Until he was thirty-four years old, Browning lived with his parents in Camberwell, which was then a suburb of London. As a young man, Browning's father had been sent by his own father to supervise a sugar plantation in the West Indies. However, he was so revolted by the whole idea of slavery that he refused to have any more to do with the family business, came home and took a post with the Bank of England, as a clerk. Although his income cannot have been high, he was a passionate collector of books and prints, and collected a library of six thousand books.

Emily Jane Brontë (1818 - 1848)
Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, although she is usually associated with Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors where her father became rector in 1820, when she was two. She was the fifth of six children. Her sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte and her brother Branwell were older than her, and her sister Anne younger. Their mother died in 1824, after which their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, and a servant, Tabitha Aykroyd ('Tabby') lived in the household and looked after the children.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, near Staines in Middlesex. His father, Thomas Arnold, became headmaster of Rugby School in 1828 and in that role was immortalised in Thomas Hughes' novel Tom Brown's Schooldays. Arnold was educated first at Winchester, and then from 1837 to 1841 at Rugby, where he made friends with both Thomas Hughes and the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. As a boy, he met William and Dorothy Wordsworth when his father bought a summer house in the Lake District, and Wordsworth's style and philosophy had some influence on his own.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born at Stratford in Essex, the eldest of nine children in a middle-class family. His mother was a devout High-Church Anglican, and his father a man with wide-ranging interests who had published a volume of verse as well as other books. The parents encouraged their children in the arts, and two of Hopkins' brothers became professional artists. Hopkins himself was a good amateur artist, who was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites - a group of artists and poets who tried to infuse art with moral qualities by observing nature closely. As a result of his interest in the Pre-Raphaelites, he came to know the poetry of Christina Rossetti well, and also loved the work of another Anglican priest-poet, the seventeenth century Metaphysical poet George Herbert.

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 ·  Arnold
 ·  Blake
 ·  E Brontë
 ·  E B Browning
 ·  R Browning
 ·  Burns
 ·  Byron
 ·  Chaucer
 ·  Clare
 ·  Coleridge
 ·  Donne
 ·  Dryden
 ·  Gray
 ·  Herbert
 ·  Herrick
 ·  Hopkins
 ·  Keats
 ·  Marvell
 ·  Milton
 ·  Pope
 ·  C Rossetti
 ·  Shakespeare
 ·  Shelley
 ·  Spenser
 ·  Tennyson
 ·  Vaughan
 ·  Wordsworth
 ·  Wyatt

Literature