Due to a dead laptop, this site will not be updated for a while. When the laptop is fixed, I'll resume posting.

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae died January 28th, 1918. He was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae was appointed as a field surgeon in the Canadian artillery and was in charge of a field hospital during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. McCrae's friend and former student, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem, "In Flanders Fields", which was written on May 3, 1915 and first published in the magazine Punch.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/john-mccrae/biography/
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The poem I’m reading is “In Flanders Fields”.

Robert Burns, sometimes known as the 'ploughman poet', was born this day in 1759. He was the eldest son of a poverty-stricken farmer. Though his father had moved to Ayrshire, where Burns was born, in order to attempt to improve his fortunes, he eventually died as a bankrupt - after taking on first one farm and then, unsuccessful, moving to another - in 1784. Robert, who had been to school since the age of six, and was also educated at home by a teacher, had, by the age of fifteen, already become the farm's chief laborer. He had also acquired a reading knowledge of French and Latin and had read Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton and the Bible. After his father's death, he and his brother continued farming together, working now at Mossigiel.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/robert-burns/biography/.

The poem I’m reading is “A Red, Red Rose”.

William Butler Yeats died this day in 1939. He was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honored for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which is a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/william-butler-yeats/biography/

The poem I’m reading is “A Dream of Death”.

Edward Lear died January 29th 1888. He was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularized.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/edward-lear/biography/

The poem I’m reading is “There Was An Old Man With A Beard”.

George Gordon Byron, known simply as Lord Byron, died this day in 1788. He was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/george-gordon-byron-3/biography/

The poem I’m reading is “She Walks in Beauty”.

Eric Arthur Blair died this day in 1950. He was known by his pen name George Orwell, and was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and belief in democratic socialism.
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For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/george-orwell/biography/
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The poem I’m reading is “Kitchener”.

Nathaniel Parker Willis was born this day in 1806. He was also known as N. P. Willis, and was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. For a time, he was the employer of former slave and future writer Harriet Jacobs. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister wrote under the name Fanny Fern.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/nathaniel-parker-willis/biography/

The poem I’m reading is “Love in a Cottage”.

Edgar Allen Poe was born this day in 1809. He was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/edgar-allan-poe/biography/

The poem I’m reading is “A Dream Within a Dream”.

John Donne was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and priest. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterized by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. 

For more information, access www.poemhunter.com/john-donne/biography/

The poem I’m reading is “Death be not Proud”.