Lewis Blake (born June 1946) is a British poet and artist. He is a member of the Cambridge School of poetry, and, to a certain extent, the British Poetry Revival.
Blake was born in Reydon, near Southwold in Suffolk in June 1946. He was educated at City College Norwich before going to read Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Bristol.
For some time he worked as a newspaper journalist as a writer of obituaries and a reviewer of literary texts. As well as working as a mainstream journalist he has also written reviews for the academic journals ELH and PMLA.
Blake's works are known for their surreal humour, unusual use of subordinate clauses and his borrowing of esoteric, technical words. His poems include such combinations as computer acronyms and file types juxtaposed with hip-hop style speech and literary criticism and valley girl speak.
Blake's influences are wide ranging, and his poems contain eclectic references to different cultures. In particular he draws on surrealism, dadaism, the contemporary avant-garde and members of the beat generation.
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".
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself".
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.
Cecil Day-Lewis, often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake.
Christopher Murray Grieve, best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid, was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 but left in 1933 due to his Marxist–Leninist views. He joined the Communist Party the following year only to be expelled in 1938 for his nationalist sympathies. He would subsequently stand as a parliamentary candidate for both the Scottish National Party (1945) and British Communist Party (1964).
Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was literary editor of The Nation, in New York City (1924–1928), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.
Kathleen Jessie Raine CBE was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.
Jack Lindsay was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane. He was the eldest son of Norman Lindsay and brother of author Philip Lindsay.
Randall Carline Swingler MM was an English poet, writing extensively in the 1930s in the communist interest.
Ruthven Campbell Todd was a Scottish poet, artist and novelist, best known as an editor of the works of William Blake, and expert on his printing techniques. During the 1940s he also wrote detective fiction under the pseudonym R. T. Campbell and children's fiction during the 1950s.
James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM was a British-based Australian poet.
Sir Herbert John Clifford Grierson, FBA was a Scottish literary scholar, editor, and literary critic.
Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr. was an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist and college professor. He was appointed the sixteenth and later the twenty-eighth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1964, and in 1984.
Vincenzo Cardarelli, pseudonym of Nazareno Caldarelli was an Italian poet and journalist.
Michael Yechiel Ha-Levi Horovitz was a German-born British poet, editor, visual artist and translator who was a leading part of the Beat Poetry scene in the UK. In 1959, while still a student, he founded the "trail-blazing" literary periodical New Departures, publishing experimental poetry, including the work of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many other American and British beat poets. Horovitz read his own work at the 1965 landmark International Poetry Incarnation, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, deemed to have spawned the British underground scene, when an audience of more than 6,000 came to hear readings by the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Douglas Stewart was a major twentieth century Australian poet, as well as short story writer, essayist and literary editor. He published 13 collections of poetry, 5 verse plays, including the well-known Fire on the Snow, many short stories and critical essays, and biographies of Norman Lindsay and Kenneth Slessor. He also edited several poetry anthologies.
John Birtwhistle is an English poet published by Carcanet Press. His libretto for David Blake’s opera The Plumber’s Gift (1989) was staged by English National Opera at the London Coliseum and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
His poetry is included in:
Persing, Louisa, Ed. (1976). To Banbury Cross and Back: A Collection of Modern Poetry, Palomar Publishing Co. ISBN 0-686-17956-0