In poetry, a couplet is a pair of successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (closed) couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse. In a run-on (open) couplet, the meaning of the first line continues to the second.
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα. This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His trials in language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's home in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even to leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most of her friendships were based entirely upon correspondence.
Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for its formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Urdu poetry is a tradition of poetry and has many different forms. Today, it is an important part of the culture of India and Pakistan. According to Naseer Turabi there are five major poets of Urdu: Mir Taqi Mir (d.1810), Mirza Ghalib, Mir Anees (d.1874), Muhammad Iqbal and Josh Malihabadi (d.1982). The language of Urdu reached its pinnacle under the British Raj, and it received official status. All famous writers of Urdu language including Ghalib and Iqbal were given British scholarships. Following the Partition of India in 1947, it found major poets and scholars were divided along the nationalistic lines. However, Urdu poetry is cherished in both the nations. Both the Muslims and Hindus from across the border continue the tradition.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
The World's Wife is a collection of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy, originally published in the UK in 1999 by both Picador and Anvil Press Poetry and later published in the United States by Faber and Faber in 2000.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".
Fiona Ruth Sampson, is a British poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing. A former musician, Sampson has written on the links between music and poetry, and her work has been set to music by several composers. She has received several prizes for her literary biographies and poetry. Notably, Sampson received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and two books of essays about place and nature.
And Still I Rise is author Maya Angelou's third volume of poetry, published by Random House in 1978. It was published during one of the most productive periods in Angelou's career; she had written three autobiographies and published two other volumes of poetry up to that point. Angelou considered herself a poet and a playwright, but was best known for her seven autobiographies, especially her first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, although her poetry has also been successful. She began, early in her writing career, alternating the publication of an autobiography and a volume of poetry.
Helen Mort is a British poet and novelist. She is a five-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007, and won the Manchester Poetry Prize Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. In the same year she was shortlisted for the Picador Prize and won the Norwich Café Writers' Poetry Competition with a poem called "Deer". She was the Derbyshire Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. In 2014, she won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for "Division Street".
Polly Clark is a Canadian-born British writer and poet. She is the author of Larchfield (2017), which fictionalised a youthful period in the life of poet W.H. Auden, and Tiger (2019) about a last dynasty of wild Siberian tigers. She has published four critically acclaimed volumes of poetry. She lives in Helensburgh, Scotland.
Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink is a 1931 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, written during the Great Depression.
Hannah Sullivan is a British academic and poet. She is the author of The Work of Revision, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the University English Book Prize, as well as the poetry collection Three Poems, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is associate professor of English literature at New College, Oxford
Loop of Jade is the first book of poetry by Chinese-British poet Sarah Howe, and the first debut collection to ever win the T. S. Eliot Prize, in 2015. The collection contains poems that trace the author's journey into her own roots, including poems about growing up in Hong Kong and about her mother.
The Water Table is a collection of poetry written by Philip Gross in 2009, published by Bloodaxe Books. It won the 2009 T.S Eliot poetry Prize.
