"William Blake's significance in the Romantic movement came late in the 19th century, after what is officially considered the Romantic period. Born 1757 in London, his recognition as an artist and poet of worth began when Blake was in his sixties.
Blake's early childhood was dominated by spiritual visions which influenced his personal and working life. A passionate believer in liberty and freedom for all, especially for women, he courted controversy with his views on Church and state..." Click here to read more
"Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett [Browning] was born March 6, 1806 in Durham, England. Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations, and in 1809 he bought Hope End, a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills. Elizabeth lived a privileged childhood, riding her pony around the grounds, visiting other families in the neighborhood, and arranging family theatrical productions with her eleven brothers and sisters..." Click here to read more
Click here for Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Victorian Web
Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell (a suburb of London), the first child of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His mother was a fervent Evangelical and an accomplished pianist. Mr. Browning had angered his own father and forgone a fortune: the poet's grandfather had sent his son to oversee a West Indies sugar plantation, but the young man had found the institution of slavery so abhorrent that he gave up his prospects and returned home, to become a clerk in the Bank of England. On this very modest salary he was able to marry, raise a family, and to acquire a library of 6000 volumes...." Click here to read more
Click here for a selected bibliography of Mary, Lady Chudleigh
"Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce..." Click here to read more
More
information about Emily Dickinson (by Dr. Donna Campbell, Washington
State University)
Dickinson
Electronic Archive
"Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico.
By the time Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in New York, he had
already launched his literary career with his poem "The Negro Speaks
of Rivers" in the Crisis, edited by W E. B. Du Bois. He
had also committed himself both to writing and to writing mainly about
African Americans..." Click
here to read more
"The life and work of Andrew Marvell are both marked by extraordinary variety and range. Gifted with a most subtle and introspective imagination, he turned his talents in mid-career from incomparable lyric explorations of the inner life to panegyric and satiric poems on the men and issues involved in one of England's most crucial political epochs. The century which followed Marvell's death remembered him almost exclusively as a politician and pamphleteer. Succeeding periods, on the other hand, have all but lost the public figure in the haunting recesses of his lyric poems" -Lord, George deF, qtd. in http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/marvbio.htm
"Owen was born on 18th March 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire, son of Tom and Susan Owen. After the death of his grandfather in 1897 the family moved to Birkenhead (Merseyside).
His education began at the Birkenhead Institute, and then continued at the Technical School in Shrewsbury when the family were forced to move there in 1906-7 when his father was appointed Assistant Superintendent for the Western Region of the railways...." click here to read more
"Linda Pastan was born in New York City, graduated from Radcliffe College and received an MA from Brandeis University..." Click here to read more
"Marge Piercy (b. 1936). Born in Detroit, Marge Piercy was the first of her family to attend college.... She was active in social and political causes and fought for equal treatment of women and minorities while opposing the Vietnam War. She supported herself with odd jobs in Chicago as she pursued a writing career, but her first novel was not published until after her 1969 move to Wellfleet, Massachusetts (where she still lives). Click here to read more
"Jarold Ramsey's research interests focus on American Indian literature, Shakespeare, and modern poetry; his own poetry hearkens to folklore and the energies of colloquial speech...." Click here to read more from Ramsey's faculty profile at the University of Rochester
"William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England's Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—their older daughter Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died in childhood..." Click here to read more (from Folger Shakespeare Library)