John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Through his trials in language, writing style, and verse structure, he reinvigorated English poetry. He also dismantled outdated beliefs and established new ones through a collection of critical essays.
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
Janet Gertrude "Nettie" Palmer was an Australian poet, essayist and Australia's leading literary critic of her day. She corresponded with women writers and collated the Centenary Gift Book which gathered together writing by Victorian women.
Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968), a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Amy Clampitt was an American poet and author.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education.
Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
Walter Jackson Bate was an American literary critic and biographer. He is known for Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography-winning biographies of Samuel Johnson (1978) and John Keats (1964). Samuel Johnson also won the 1978 U.S. National Book Award in Biography.
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.
Deirdre Bair was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981.
Megan Marshall is an American scholar, writer, and biographer.
Bright Star is a 2009 biographical romantic drama film, written and directed by Jane Campion. It is based on the last three years of the life of poet John Keats and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne. Campion's screenplay was inspired by a 1997 biography of Keats by Andrew Motion, who served as a script consultant.
Frances "Fanny" Brawne Lindon is best known as the fiancée and muse to English Romantic poet John Keats. As Fanny Brawne, she met Keats, who was her neighbour in Hampstead, at the beginning of his brief period of intense creative activity in 1818. Although his first written impressions of Brawne were quite critical, his imagination seems to have turned her into the goddess-figure he needed to worship, as expressed in Endymion, and scholars have acknowledged her as his muse.
Aileen Ward, was an American professor of English literature who won both a National Book Award and a Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for her book "John Keats: The Making of a Poet".
(Winifred) Aileen Pippett née Side was a British journalist and biographer resident in the United States, author of the first full-length biography of Virginia Woolf, The Moth and the Star, first published in 1953.
