English poets
English poets to know and love.
Arnold
1822 - 1888
Matthew Arnold, the great 19th century English poet, author of "Dover Beach" and "The Scholar Gypsy".
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight
A bleak but beautiful reflection on 19th-century life by Matthew Arnold.
Chapman
1559 - 1634
George Chapman was an English dramatist and translator. His translations of Homer were praised in a famous sonnet by Keats "On first looking into Chapman's Homer"
Opening lines from Homer’s Odyssey
The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
The first lines of the Odyssey, translated by George Chapman in a version admired by Keats
Clough
1819-61
Arthur Hugh Clough was an attractive poet who expressed healthy scepticism about the public ethics of the Victorian period and wrote movingly about friendship and the pain of estrangement.
Say not the trouble nought availeth
Say not the trouble nought availeth
Optimism and self-help from this principled poet of the Victorian era
Cowley
1618-1667
Largely forgotten today, Cowley was a very famous English poet in his day and is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Gray
18th Century
Eighteenth century poet and scholar
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
Eton College in the gateway to Orcus
Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci
Virgil's traces are visible in this eighteenth-century poet
Hardy
1840-1928
An unflinching chronicler of an unforgiving century in his novels, Hardy's compassion and humanity perhaps show through more clearly in his poems.
Proud songsters
The thrushes sing as the light is going
Hardy shares his sadness and his flair for nature
Henley
1849 - 1902
W E Henley, poet, critic and friend of R L Stevenson and J M Barrie
“A late lark” and “Madam Life”
Madam Life's a Piece in Bloom
Contrasting takes on death by the Victorian W E Henley
Milton
1608 - 1674
England's great 17th-century epic poet.
Paradise Lost Book 1, lines 1 - 26
Paradise Lost begins
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
The opening lines of Milton's great epic
Owen
1893 - 1918
The famous English poet writing about the realities of the first World War.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ... ?
