Curated playlist
Epic poets
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
- Herman MelvilleHerman Melville's death notice misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick."
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
- John KeatsJohn Keats asked for a tombstone with no name on it. He died in Rome at 25, sure he had failed as a poet.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPoet Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was identified partly by a copy of Keats's Lamia in his jacket.
- OvidOvid blamed his exile on a poem and a mistake. He suggested the poem was his guide to seduction, the Ars Amatoria.
- Lord ByronWestminster Abbey refused Lord Byron's body for questionable morality. It finally gave him a memorial in 1969.
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheWhen French soldiers broke into Goethe's home in 1806, his companion Christiane Vulpius defended it.
- Dante AlighieriDante was condemned to exile from Florence and threatened with burning at the stake.
- VirgilVirgil wanted his unfinished Aeneid burned, but Augustus overruled him. The emperor ordered two executors to publish it.
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo asked for a pauper's funeral and got the largest in French history.
- Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold Paradise Lost for five pounds. The blind poet handed it to a publisher in April 1667.
- William BlakeNear death, William Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil. He drew his wife's portrait before he died.
- William MorrisWilliam Morris despised industrial capitalism yet decorated the homes of the rich.
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowLongfellow used his own body to smother the flames on his wife's burning dress. He wore a beard from then on.
- Benoît de Sainte-MaureLe Roman de Troie gave medieval French readers the Trojan War without Homer. Benoît wrote it between 1155 and 1160.
- StatiusPublius Papinius Statius, a Latin poet who lived from about 45 to about 96 CE, three times received a golden crown directly from an emperor's hand. The emperor was Domitian, and the prize was handed out at the Alban Festival. Statius left…
- Charles J. GuiteauCharles Julius Guiteau was marched to a police station a few blocks from a Washington railroad depot, repeating one line over and over. "I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts.... Arthur is president now!" The man he had just shot was James A.…
- Edmund SpenserWhen poet Edmund Spenser was buried in 1599, fellow poets threw pens and their own poems into his grave.
- LucanNero rewarded the poet Lucan with honors, then banned his poetry. Lucan's epic turned openly against the emperor.
- LucretiusA Roman poem on atoms sat forgotten in a German monastery for over a thousand years.
- Luís de CamõesPortugal's national day, the 10th of June, is the day poet Luís de Camões died.