Popular Poetry, Popular Verse - Volume II

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, is the most widely known author in all of English literature and often considered the greatest. He was an active member of a theater company for at least twenty years, during which time he wrote many great plays. Plays were not prized as literature at the time, and Shakespeare was not widely read until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a great upsurge of interest in his works began that continues today.

John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, satirist, philosopher, and chaplain who is considered a founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a group of writers characterized by their ability to coax new perspective through paradoxical images, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne's works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, and sermons. He is firmly established as one of the greatest poets in the English language, strongly influencing writers of the seventeenth century. He died in 1631 and was buried at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was an English poet popular in both literary and political circles. Brooke was educated at the Rugby school and went on to King's College at Cambridge University, where he socialized in intellectual crowds with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, W. B. Yeats, and the Bloomsbury writers. His later verse is considered some of the most important literary expressions of the First World War.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an influential English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age of English literature with the 1798 joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. He was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.