The wiki
Famous poets, lives and works
Short, readable guides to the poets everyone meets sooner or later — who they were, what they wrote, and why their lines are still with us. Each entry includes a biography, signature poems, a style guide and a quick FAQ.
American
Emily Dickinson
The recluse of Amherst
Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in almost total privacy, publishing fewer than a dozen in her lifetime. Her compressed, dash-stitched lines redefined what English poetry could sound like and made her one of the most influential lyric poets in history.
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English
William Shakespeare
The Bard of Avon
William Shakespeare is the most widely read writer in the English language. Beyond his 39 plays, his 154 sonnets and narrative poems shaped the sonnet form and left a permanent mark on how English expresses love, time, and mortality.
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American
Walt Whitman
The bard of democracy
Walt Whitman revolutionized poetry with 'Leaves of Grass' (1855), a book he revised and expanded for nearly four decades. His sweeping free verse, democratic embrace of all people, and celebration of the body broke every convention of his time.
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English
John Keats
The poet of beauty and the brief spring
John Keats wrote some of the most beloved poems in English — including the great odes of 1819 — before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-five. His creed that 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' made him a touchstone of Romantic poetry.
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English
Christina Rossetti
The devotional voice of the Victorians
Christina Rossetti wrote poems of longing, renunciation, and faith that made her one of the most admired poets of Victorian England. 'Goblin Market' remains one of the strangest and most analyzed narrative poems in the language.
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American
Robert Frost
The voice of New England
Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes and became America's most beloved poet by writing farm-country verse that sounds simple and reads inexhaustibly deep. 'The Road Not Taken' may be the most quoted — and most misread — poem in America.
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Chilean
Pablo Neruda
The people's poet of Chile
Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize in 1971 for a body of work that spans surrealist despair, epic history, political outrage, and odes to socks and tomatoes. His love poems are among the most quoted in any language.
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American
Maya Angelou
The voice that would not be caged
Maya Angelou turned a life of extraordinary hardship into poetry of defiance and joy. 'Still I Rise' and 'Phenomenal Woman' made her one of the most widely read poets in the world, and her reading at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration reached millions.
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