Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers in English. Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven. Her mother's collection of her poems forms one of the largest extant collections of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15, she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life. Later in life, she also developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for the pain from an early age, which is likely to have contributed to her frail health.
The term sonnet refers to a fixed verse poetic form, traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. It derives from the Italian word sonetto. Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
Elizabeth Joan Jennings was a British poet.
"The New Colossus" is a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887). She wrote the poem in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Emma Lazarus was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet "The New Colossus", which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, in 1883. Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus was involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue. The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty. The latter part of the sonnet was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women".
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation," Anne Sexton famously described her as "mother of us all", while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."
Helen Johnson was an African-American poet during the Harlem Renaissance. She is remembered today for her poetry that captures both the challenges and the excitement of this era during her short-lived career.
Shaul Tchernichovsky or Saul Gutmanovich Tchernichovsky was a Russian-born Hebrew poet. He is considered one of the great Hebrew poets, identified with nature poetry, and a poet greatly influenced by the culture of ancient Greece.
Wanda Coleman was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles".
Jordie Albiston was an Australian poet.
Catherine M. Chandler is a Canadian poet and translator, born in Queens, New York City and raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, emigrating to Canada in 1971. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Spanish from Wilkes University and a Master of Arts in Education from McGill University. She and her husband currently divide their time between their homes in Saint-Lazare-de-Vaudreuil, Québec, and Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Yvonne Green was an English poet, translator, writer and barrister.
Willa Hope Schneberg is an American poet. She has published five full-length poetry collections, including In The Margins Of The World, winner of the 2002 Oregon Book Award; Box Poems ; Storytelling In Cambodia ; Rending the Garment ; and The Naked Room. The letterpress chapbook, The Books of Esther, was produced in conjunction with her interdisciplinary exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. The Naked Room was released in 2023.
Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.
Aviva Dautch is a British poet, academic, curator and magazine publisher, who is of Eastern European Jewish ancestry.
Jasminne Mendez is an Afro-Latino American author, poet, playwright, performer and educator. She is a co-founder and the program director for Tintero Projects. She is co-host on the poetry and writing podcast series, InkWell, a collaboration between Tintero Projects and Inprint Houston. Mendez is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow and a Macondo and Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alumni.
Major poetry related events taking place worldwide during 2021 are outlined below under different sections. This includes poetry books released during the year in different languages, major literary awards, poetry festivals and events, besides anniversaries and deaths of renowned poets etc. Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
