BIODATA of poets quoted in the Year 12 Core unit Poetry of Social Comment
W. H. Auden (1907-73) Leading English 20th Century poet, lived in America returned to become Professor of Poetry at Oxford..
Rupert Brooke English patriot poet of World War I.
Leonard Cohen 1960s US songwriter, culture cult leader and vocalist.
e.e.cummings US 20th century poet (NB name always written in lower case)
Michael Gray Dugan (1947- ) was born in Melbourne, Victoria. He has worked with books and as an author for his entire career. In the 1970s he was consultant to booksellers. During this time he was editor of The Australian Library News and co-founded and edited Bookmark. He has been consultant to the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, and in 1983-1986, was editor of their publications. He has also been consultant to Penguin Books. Dugan was concerned in the 'New Australian Poetry' movement, produced Crosscurrents, a little journal. He is the author and editor of many books for children, both factual and fictional, and was for a time The Age newspaper's children's critic. He has written plays and many scripts for radio. [edited from the Ozlit@Vicnet Database of Australian Writers].
Robert Frost 1874-1963 click here
Robert Graves English Victorian poet.
Janis Joplin US movie star and lead singer. died from overdose; life celebrated in the film The Rose.
Gwen Harwood (1920- ) Born in Brisbane lives in Tasmania.
A. D. Hope Tasmanian Professor of Literature; Catholic poet. "was denied the role of leader or father-figure of Australian poetry" (Bennett, 477); featured personal or 'confessional' poetry; critical elistist & European wit; traditional, classical, rational, constructivist, humanist.
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was known as the "O. Henry of Harlem" and was born in Joplin, Missouri and educated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages. Read also A Dream Deferred.
Vasso Kalamaras Greek born first generation Australian writer coming to prominence since the 1960s; bitter stories about Australian life e.g., Other Earth; Four Greek Australian stories FAP 1977
Christopher Marlowe 1564-1593. Shakespeare's most important predecessor in English drama; established blank verse; splendid career; unorthodox religious opinions; was killed iun an argument over the bill at an inn.
Roger McGough Popular humorist English poet of the 1960s.
Adrian Mitchell. Australian, editor of Charles Harpur (1973); author of 'Fiction' in The Oxford History of Australian Literature.
Peter Porter (1929- ) is a Queensland born writer and poet.
Vicki Raymond Tasmanian dam protestor.
Siegfried Sassoon. With Owen leading English anti-World War I poet.
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822) Leading English Romantic poet with Wordsworth; lived and died riotiously in Italy.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn anti-Soviet poet and critic. wrote of life in the gulags.
Wole Soyinka (1935- ) Nigerian. One of the best known African poets and playwrights of the 1980s.
Douglas Stewart Leading 20th Century Australian poet and playwright; later 'pastoral' poet; features magnification of detail (Bennet, 1988:363) and invitations to mysticism; his emblematic creatures; primitivism of nature.
Colin Thiele (1920- ) Australian poet and novelist: Storm Boy, The Sun on the Stubble. a qualified optimism, lost world of family lovingly created; strong sense of social & geographical context.
John Updike (1932- ) 1955-57 New Yorker staff writer. US blockbuster novelist and poet.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Born in the Lake District, he collaborated with Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads which changed the face of English poetry.
Judith Wright (1915-2000) is primarily a poet and an activist but is mainly a poet. She was born into a pastoral family whose roots in this country go back to the 1830s when they were granted large tracks of land in the Hunter Valley, and before that in England they go back through a long line of country gentry on one side and Scots Rebels on the other.
She brought a particular perspective to the world of people, things, ideas and values, a uniqueness Hopkins writes about that made her who she was. "Essentially Judith Wright's self has been oppositional. She has played a match against the current of the times, against technology and the destruction of the environment, against war and its violations of our common humanity and against the historical amnesia that condemns the past and the original inhabitants of this country to oblivion. . . reminding us despite the concealments and evasions of our culture of 'the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love' " . . . Her Australian matter-of-factness . . . Wright's gift for love, friendship and the whole range of bodily experience and the passionate honesty animate her still. . . . She has lived her own life, never the one others posited for her, and she kept her own way of 'looking aslant on the world', to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson." (edited from Veronica Brady's biography, "A Delicate Balance between Trespass and Honour" at ANL site).
W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats 1865-1929. Irish playwright, poet, critic. His interest in religion led to Theosophy and mystical arts as the most important pursuit after poetry; he yeanred for 'psychological' truth.; 1890 joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; 1902 helped found the Irish national theatre; 1903 lucrative lecture tour of USA; Easter 1916 celebrates the heroes and heroines of Irish nationalism; 1922 Irish Civil War, Irish Free; State Constitution and became an Irish Senator; 1923 won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yevtushenko, Yevgeni Aleksandrovich. b 1933; moved to Moscow 1944; non-conformist works attacking prejudices and abuses in the Soviet system; reintroduced love poetry and lyrics after the Stalinist era; were translated world-wide; 1960 tours abroard; 1963 rebuked by Khrushchev after his autobiography.
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