Poets

Writers known for poetry.

People in Poets

23 profiles

Writer

Maya Angelou

Writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Poet

Rabindranath Tagore

Writing Gitanjali and songs that became two national anthems.

Writer

A. A. Milne

Creating Winnie-the-Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood.

Poet

Lord Byron

Writing Don Juan and embodying the rebellious Romantic poet.

Writer

Alice Walker

Writing The Color Purple.

Playwright

Bertolt Brecht

Writing Mother Courage and developing epic theatre.

Writer

Victor Hugo

Writing Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Writer

Dr. Seuss

Creating The Cat in the Hat, the Grinch and Green Eggs and Ham.

Writer

Jack Kerouac

Writing On the Road and becoming a central Beat writer.

Poet

Seamus Heaney

Writing poetry rooted in Irish rural life, history and moral conflict.

Poet

Walt Whitman

Writing Leaves of Grass and expanding American free verse.

Writer

Thomas Hardy

Writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles and novels set in a changing rural Wessex.

Poet

Alexander Pushkin

Writing Eugene Onegin and helping shape modern Russian literature.

Poet

W. B. Yeats

Writing major Irish poetry and helping establish the Abbey Theatre.

Writer

Wole Soyinka

Writing Death and the King’s Horseman and winning Africa’s first literature Nobel.

Writer

Herman Melville

Writing Moby-Dick and its obsessive hunt for a white whale.

Writer

Jorge Luis Borges

Creating labyrinths, imaginary books and philosophical short stories.

Writer

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writing Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Writer

D. H. Lawrence

Writing Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Playwright

Oscar Wilde

Writing The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with wit that exposes social hypocrisy.

Writer

Margaret Atwood

Writing The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopia about women living under a religious dictatorship.

Poet

William Blake

Creating visionary poems and images, including The Tyger and Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Writer

Rudyard Kipling

Writing The Jungle Book, Kim and the Just So Stories.