Poets

Poets

This growing section contains notes of biographical nature. These are extra brief biographies of poets. These notes are used in the so-called author boxes below the author’s avatar and, when at least partially complete, they will appear as a separate page.

 

C

Crowley, English

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet and satanist, also an occultist, ceremonial magician, painter, novelist, and mount climber. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus.

D

Dahl, British, Welsh, English

Roald Dahl ( 1916 – 1990) was a British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot. His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children’s books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour.

Derwent-Hope, Australian

Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.

Dobrolybov, Russian

Alexander Dobrolyubov (1876-1945) Russian symbolist poet, from a middle noble family, closer to the upper stratum of Russian society, known not so much for his poetry as for his way of life. The most audacious of the early decadent life-builders: “he behaved like a priest, smoked opium, lived in a black room, etc.; then went” to the people “, founded a sect; at the end of his life he almost forgot how to write correctly, in the 1930s he was forgotten by all, but still made attempts to get published.

G

 

Gabriac, Russian

Elisabeth or Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva (married as Vasilyeva) (1887 – 1928) was a Russian poet, better known under her literary pseudonym-hoax Cherubina de Gabriac (or Gabriak)

Glazkov,  Russian

Nikolai Ivanovich Glazkov (1919-1979), the name may be misspelled as Nikolay by post-Soviet Soviet translators, Glaskow, Glaskoff, was a Russian and Soviet author and translated as well as a talented poet. Glazkov is unusual, nonconformist, subtle, intelligent, quite “on the verge”, even more Russian than Soviet, even though his life came during the era of the Bolshevik yoke, his father was a victim of the regime and Nikolai Glazkov never attained official recognition despite or perhaps because of the subtle mocking brilliance of his verse.

 

H

Huxley, English

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 – 1963) is an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.

 

K

Koni, Russian

 

Theodore Koni, also rendered pseudophonetically as Fyodor Alekseevich Koni (1809-1879) was a Russian playwright, poet, drama critic, memoirist, translator, theater historian, teacher, and poet. He was the father of perhaps the most famous jurist, lawyer, and judge of the 19th century Russia, as well as an essayist, Anatole (Anatoli, Anatoly) Koni ( 1844 – 1927).

 

KH

Khodasevich (Chodasiewicz), Russian

Vsevolod Khodasevich (Chodasiewicz, 1876-1945), born into an impoverished noble family, in Moscow, a Russian poet and translator. Kodasevich also acted as a literary critic, memoirist and historian of literature, a great connoisseur of Pushkin’s work. Khodasevich is undoubtedly one of the greatest Russian poets of all time.

L

Larkin, English

Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985), Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Cavalier of the Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.

Lorca, Spanish

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a celebrated Spanish writer, known for his poems and plays, mainly the famous ‘Romancero Gitano’. He has also written other well-known poems like ‘Seis poemas gallegos’, ‘Quimera’, and ‘Libro de poemas’. His plays are also quite famous, some of them being, ‘El maleficio de la mariposa’, ‘Retablillo de Don Cristóbal’, and of course ‘La zapatera prodigiosa’. This Spanish poet and playwright created quite a stir during his lifetime, owing to his public acceptance of being a homosexual. His relationship with the famous surreal artist Salvador Dalí was a topic of constant speculation. He was also known for his socialist views. When this renowned writer was assassinated, his murder gave rise to a lot of conjectures. Most believe that he was murdered because of his connection with the Marxist Popular Front. Despite all speculations, he is remembered today as one of the finest writers that Spain has ever produced.

M

Marshak  (Marszak, Marchac),  Soviet

Samuil Marshak, Marszak (1887-1964), was born on October 22 (November 3), 1887 in Voronezh in the Chizhovka settlement into a Jewish family of migrants from outside the Pale of Settlement. His father, Yakov Mironovich Marshak (1855-1924), a native of Koydanov, worked as a foreman at the Mikhailov brothers’ soap factory; mother – Evgenia Borisovna Gitelson (1867-1917), a native of Vitebsk – was a housewife. Marshak is a major Jewish author, poetry writer for Russian-speaking Soviet youth and a propagandist in the service of Bolshevism with wide recognition of the official and nomenklatura authorities – a laureate of as many as four Stalin Prizes.

 

N

Nicolson

Violet Nicolson ( 1865 – 1904); otherwise known as Adela Florence Nicolson (née Cory), was an English poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, however she became known as Violet Nicolson. In the early 1900s, she became a best-selling author. She committed suicide and is buried in Madras, now Chennai, India.

 

P

Pope

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) was a a post-Restoration English poet and satirist. He is a poet of the (British) Augustan period and one of its greatest artistic exponents.

Pushkin (Pooshkin, Pouchkine)

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1937) was a Russian poet, playwright and prose writer, founder of the realistic trend in Russian literature, literary critic and theorist of literature, historian, publicist, journalist; one of the most important cultural figures in Russia in the first third of the 19th century.

 

R

Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke ( 1875 – 1926). an Austrian poet and novelist of great influence, he was born in Prague, a city in the Austrian Empire now occupied by the ethnofascist Czech statelet. Rilke’s command of the German language is brilliant, both his prose and poems are intensely lyrical and some believe that his work is infused with mysticism.

 

S

Samoilov

David Samoilov (real name – David Samuilovich Kaufman; Kaufmann, June 1, 1920, Moscow – February 23, 1990, Tallinn, the real name of the city is Revel or Reval) – Russian and Soviet poet and translator. One of the largest representatives of the generation of poets who left the student’s bench for the front.

Shakespeare, English

William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded, some say unjustly, as the greatest writer in the English language and, at least in the Anglophone world, as the world’s greatest dramatist.

T

Tasso, Italian

Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, known for his 1591 poem Gerusalemme liberata, in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the Siege of Jerusalem of 1099

Tessimond, English

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond (1902 -1962) was an English poet. He had a tumultuous childhood, ran from boarding school, went to work, somehow attended the University of Liverpool, avoided service in WWI and then discovered that he is unfit for military service after he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which in those days was known as manic depression. A.S. Tessimond is a wonderful though maybe somewhat underappreciated poet. He died from in 1962 from a brain haemorrhage.

Turgenev, Russian

Ivan Turgenev, Toorgeneff, Tourgeneff, Tourgheniev (1818-1883) Russian realist writer, poet, publicist, playwright, and translator. One of the classics of Russian literature, who made the most significant contribution to its development in the second half of the 19th century. A Member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

W

Wheatley, American, African, English

Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), a negro poetess, also an American poet or Afro-American poet, and an English Colonial poet, . She was born in Africa (in Gambia or Senegal) and was aptured by slave traders at the age of eight, she was sold to a family living in Boston, Mass., whose name she bears. While serving as a maid-servant to her proprietor’s wife, she showed an unusual facility with languages. She began writing poetry at the age of thirteen, using as models British poets of the time, especially Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray). In 1773 she accompanied a member of the Wheatley family to England, where she gained widespread attention in literary circles. She subsequently returned to Boston. Her best-known poems are “To the University of Cambridge in New England” (1767), In all honestly Phillis Wheatley should rather be considered English than an Afro-American poet but the exact classification of who she was would depend on the political and cultural views, and biases, of the “classifier.

 

Z

Zhukovsky

Zhukovsky Vasily Andreevich, Basil Zhukovskii (1783 – 1852), Joukovsky, Joukoffsky, Shukowski – the great Russian poet and translator. Born in the Tula province, the village of Mishenskoye. Zhukovsky received his education first in a private boarding school, and later in the Tula public school. He edited the journal “Vestnik Evropy” (Europe’s Herald or The Herald of Europe). In 1815, the poet began his court service, which lasted more than twenty-five years. At this time, the author writes such famous works as “The Twelve Sleeping Virgins” and “Aeolian Harp”. Zhukovsky married when he was fifty-eight years old, his bride, a twenty-year-old Elizabeth, was the daughter of his good friend. He died in Germany, and after his death the remains of the poet were transported to St. Petersburg, where he is buried.