Curated playlist
Epic poets
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was…
- Herman MelvilleHerman Melville died on the morning of the 28th of September 1891, and the death notice in The New York Times misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick." That small error would later be read as proof he had been forgotten. By 1876, every…
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
- John KeatsJohn Keats had been publishing poetry for less than four years when tuberculosis killed him in Rome at the age of 25. His last request was a tombstone bearing no name and no date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in…
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote. His boat, the Don Juan, had been custom-built in Genoa, and his second wife Mary…
- OvidPublius Ovidius Naso was born on the 20th of March 43 BC in the Paelignian town of Sulmo, a place tucked into an Apennine valley east of Rome. That birth year was no quiet moment in Roman history. It was a year of political upheaval, and…
- Lord ByronLord Byron got up at two in the afternoon. By the time he sat down to dinner, the house around him resounded with the unarbitrated quarrels of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon, with…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and…
- Dante AlighieriDante Alighieri began his most famous poem with a line of plain confusion: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," or "Midway upon the journey of our life." He was writing about a man lost in a dark wood, around 35 years old, imagining a…
- VirgilVirgil stood on a pillar of bright tin-plated iron. That is how Geoffrey Chaucer placed him in The House of Fame, written between 1374 and 1385, granting the Roman poet a uniquely prominent position in history. Dante went further. In the…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory. He would go on to become one of the defining voices in modernist literature, a tireless champion of writers like…
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the publisher Samuel Simmons, with a promise of five more pounds if the print run sold…
- William BlakeWilliam Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil so he could keep sketching. He was near death, working feverishly on illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, and he could not stop. On the 12th of August 1827, he finally set down…
- William MorrisWilliam Morris arrived in the world on the 24th of March 1834, and by the time he died on the 3rd of October 1896, he had left his mark on textiles, poetry, fantasy fiction, architectural preservation, and revolutionary socialism. Few…
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond", and almost nobody noticed. What followed across…
- Benoît de Sainte-MaureBenoît de Sainte-Maure died in 1173, leaving behind a poem so vast it runs to 40,000 lines. That poem, Le Roman de Troie, retold the fall of Troy for a medieval French audience who had never read Homer directly. It ignited a whole genre of…
- StatiusPublius Papinius Statius grew up in the Bay of Naples during the early years of the first century. His father, a native of Velia, moved to Rome and taught with marked success before returning to Naples. The elder Statius competed in poetic…
- Edmund SpenserEdmund Spenser died in London on the 13th of January 1599, and according to Ben Jonson, he died "for want of bread". That claim was almost certainly false. Spenser had a payment authorised by the government and was owed his royal pension.…
- LucanLucan was born on the 3rd of November in AD 39, in the Roman colony of Corduba, in the province of Hispania Baetica, now Córdoba, Spain. His full name was Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, though English speakers know him simply as Lucan. Ancient…
- LucretiusTitus Lucretius Carus lived and died in the first century BC, and yet the poem he left behind nearly vanished from the world entirely. For more than a thousand years, De rerum natura sat forgotten in a monastery somewhere in Germany, until…
- Luís de CamõesLuís de Camões set sail from Lisbon on Palm Sunday, the 24th of March 1553, carrying nothing but his soldier's pay and the beginnings of a poem. He had just been freed from prison by royal order, the pardon describing him simply as "a…