PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: poetry
English author
William Shakespeare was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare occupies a position unique in...
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era....
English poet
John Milton was an English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, considered the most significant English author after William Shakespeare. Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest...
English author
Samuel Johnson was an English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters. Johnson once characterized literary biographies...
Italian artist
Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist...
British writer and artist
William Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such...
Italian poet
Dante was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia (The Divine...
Spanish writer
Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been...
French dramatist
Jean Racine was a French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery of French classical tragedy. His reputation rests on the plays he wrote between 1664 and 1691, notably Andromaque (first...
English writer
Geoffrey Chaucer was the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare and “the first finder of our language.” His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English. He also contributed...
Italian Christian theologian and philosopher
St. Thomas Aquinas ; canonized July 18, 1323; feast day January 28, formerly March 7) was an Italian Dominican theologian, the foremost medieval Scholastic. He developed his own conclusions from Aristotelian...
American poet
Emily Dickinson was an American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the...
English writer
D.H. Lawrence was an English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. His novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) made him one...
French author
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and...
Roman poet
Horace was an outstanding Latin lyric poet and satirist under the emperor Augustus. The most frequent themes of his Odes and verse Epistles are love, friendship, philosophy, and the art of poetry. Horace...
French writer
Victor Hugo was a poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country’s greatest poets, he is better known abroad for...
English novelist
George Meredith was an English Victorian poet and novelist, whose novels are noted for their wit, brilliant dialogue, and aphoristic quality of language. Meredith’s novels are also distinguished by psychological...
Roman statesman, scholar, and writer
Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer who vainly tried to uphold republican principles in the final civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic. His writings include books of rhetoric,...
English poet
Edmund Spenser was an English poet whose long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene is one of the greatest in the English language. It was written in what came to be called the Spenserian stanza. Little is...
English poet
John Donne was a leading English poet of the Metaphysical school and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1621–31). Donne is often considered the greatest love poet in the English language. He is also...
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor who became a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry with such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943)....
British poet and critic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria...
Austrian-German poet
Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austro-German poet who became internationally famous with his lyric poems and such works as Duino Elegies (1923) and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). Since his death in 1926, he has...
Anglo-Irish author and clergyman
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a...
Russian author
Aleksandr Pushkin was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin’s father...
Russian author
Ivan Turgenev was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On...
French poet
Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet and adventurer who won renown in the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry. Rimbaud grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region of northeastern France....
Spanish author
Pedro Calderón de la Barca was a dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish playwright of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El médico de su honra (1635;...
English author
Alexander Pope was a poet and satirist of the English Augustan period, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34)....
Greek poet
Pindar was the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece and the master of epinicia, choral odes celebrating victories achieved in the Pythian, Olympic, Isthmian, and Nemean games. Pindar was of noble birth,...
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger and songwriter who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with...
Roman poet
Virgil was a Roman poet, best known for his national epic, the Aeneid (from c. 30 bce; unfinished at his death). Virgil was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet, an estimation that subsequent...
Italian poet
Petrarch was an Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of...
British poet
Lord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage...
Roman poet
Ovid was a Roman poet noted especially for his Ars amatoria and Metamorphoses. His verse had immense influence both by its imaginative interpretations of Classical myth and as an example of supreme technical...
Spanish author
Lope de Vega was an outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant. Lope...
English author
William Wordsworth was an English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement. The principles he outlines in the preface to the...
American author
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were...
Irish author
James Joyce was an Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce is...
Norwegian dramatist and poet
Henrik Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background...
English actor, poet, and producer
David Garrick was an English actor, producer, dramatist, poet, and comanager of the Drury Lane Theatre. Garrick was of French and Irish descent, the son of Peter Garrick, a captain in the English army,...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
German writer
Friedrich Schiller was a leading German dramatist, poet, and literary theorist, best remembered for such dramas as Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers), the Wallenstein trilogy (1800–01), Maria Stuart (1801),...
British poet
John Keats was an English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical...
German author
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German dramatist, critic, and writer on philosophy and aesthetics. He helped free German drama from the influence of classical and French models and wrote plays of lasting...
Italian poet and scholar
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian poet and scholar, best remembered as the author of the earthy tales in the Decameron. With Petrarch he laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance and raised...
American poet
Walt Whitman was an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, is a landmark in the history of American literature. Walt Whitman was born into...
British critic
Matthew Arnold was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the...
British author
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, best known for his novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr....
American writer
Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been...
