Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977 "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars". He was part of the Generation of '27.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance.
De rerum natura is a first-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through poetic language and metaphors. Namely, Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.
The poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-two years, in Vienna in 1833. As a sustained exercise in tetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam, thus, “In Memoriam” also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian Era (1837–1901), the poem thus is an elegy, a requiem, and a dirge for a friend, a time, and a place.
Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky was lauded by Alexander Pushkin as the finest Russian elegiac poet. After a long period when his reputation was on the wane, Baratynsky was rediscovered by Russian Symbolism poets as a supreme poet of thought.
Illuminations is an incomplete suite of prose poems by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, first published partially in La Vogue, a Paris literary review, in May–June 1886. The texts were reprinted in book form in October 1886 by Les publications de La Vogue under the title Les Illuminations proposed by the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's former lover. In his preface, Verlaine explained that the title was based on the English word illuminations, in the sense of coloured plates, and a sub-title that Rimbaud had already given the work. Verlaine dated its composition between 1873 and 1875.
The Georgics is a poem by Latin poet Virgil, likely published in 29 BCE. As the name suggests the subject of the poem is agriculture; but far from being an example of peaceful rural poetry, it is a work characterized by tensions in both theme and purpose.
Poésies is the title attributed to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud written between approx. 1869 and 1873. Les étrennes des orphelins (1869) is the first known poem of Rimbaud.
Klemens Janicki (1516–1543) was one of the most outstanding Latin poets of the 16th century.
The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner was an English newspaper founded by George Canning in 1797 and devoted to opposing the radicalism of the French Revolution. It lasted only a year, but was considered highly influential, and is not to be confused with the Anti-Jacobin Review, a publication which sprang up on its demise. The Revolution polarized British political opinion in the 1790s, with conservatives outraged at the killing of the king Louis XVI of France, the expulsion of the nobles, and the Reign of Terror. Great Britain went to war against Revolutionary France. Conservatives castigated every radical opinion in Great Britain as "Jacobin", warning that radicalism threatened an upheaval of British society. The Anti-Jacobin sentiment was expressed in print. William Gifford was its editor. Its first issue was published on 20 November 1797 and during the parliamentary session of 1797–98 it was issued every Monday.
Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with same-sex romantic or sexual interaction. The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg. In the female-female tradition, authors may include those such as Sappho, "Michael Field", "Marie-Madeleine" and Maureen Duffy. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
The poetic style of John Milton, also known as Miltonic verse, Miltonic epic, or Miltonic blank verse, was a highly influential poetic structure popularized by Milton. Although Milton wrote earlier poetry, his influence is largely grounded in his later poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
"Fastitocalon" is a medieval-style poem by J. R. R. Tolkien about a gigantic sea turtle. The setting is explicitly Middle-earth. The poem is included in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
Luca Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet, novelist and translator, whose contributions were a synthesis of Symbolism, Parnassianism and modernist literature. His career, cut short by pneumonia, mostly produced lyric poetry with cosmopolitan characteristics, distinct preferences for neologisms and archaisms, and willing treatment of kitsch as a poetic subject. These subjects were explored in various poetic forms, ranging from the conventionalism of formes fixes, some of which were by then obsolete, to the rebellious adoption of free verse. His poetry earned posthumous critical attention and was ultimately collected in a 1972 edition, but sparked debates among literary historians about the author's contextual importance.
Eclogue 4, also known as the Fourth Eclogue, is the name of a Latin poem by the Roman poet Virgil. Part of his first major work, the Eclogues, the piece was written around 40 BC, during a time of brief stability following the Treaty of Brundisium; it was later published in and around the years 39–38 BC. The work describes the birth of a boy, a supposed savior, who once of age will become divine and eventually rule over the world. During late antiquity and the Middle Ages, a desire emerged to view Virgil as a virtuous pagan, and as such, early Christians, such as Roman Emperor Constantine, early Christian theologian Lactantius, and St. Augustine—to varying degrees—reinterpreted the poem to be about the birth of Jesus Christ.
Paterne Berrichon - the pseudonym of Pierre-Eugène Dufour, born 10 January 1855 at Issoudun and died 30 July 1922 at La Rochefoucauld - was a French poet, painter, sculptor and designer. He is best known as husband of Isabelle Rimbaud, and the brother-in-law and publisher of Arthur Rimbaud.
Eldorado is a volume of poetry by Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff. First published in 1928, the collection gathers poems that speak mostly of sailors' and pirates' lives and desires. The poems contain familiar themes for Slauerhoff: a sailor's life, the impossibility of life on land or in society, the myth of the pirate and the Flying Dutchman.
Canti del Sole is a song cycle written by the British-American composer Bernard Rands. The music exists in two arrangements: one for tenor and orchestra and the other for tenor and chamber ensemble. The orchestral version was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and was first performed by the tenor Paul Sperry and the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Zubin Mehta at Avery Fisher Hall on June 8, 1983. Canti del Sole is the second of Rands's "Canti" trilogy, preceded by Canti Lunatici for soprano (1981) and followed by Canti dell’Eclisse for bass (1992). The piece was awarded the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
