Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973)   H. Auden, Anglo-American poet was educated at Oxford. Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, North Yorkshire, as the son of George Augustus Auden, a distinguished physician, and Rosalie (Bicknell) Auden. Solihull in the West Midlands, where Auden was brought up, remained important to him as a poet. Auden was educated at St. Edmund’s Hindhood and then at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk. In 1925...

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) William Wordsworth was the British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. William Wordsworth was born on April 17, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther’s attorney. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth’s imagination and gave him a love of nature. He...

William Somerset Maugham  (1874 – 1965) William Somerset Maugham was an English author noted as an expert storyteller and a master of fiction technique. He was born in Paris as the sixth and youngest son of the solicitor to the British embassy. He learned French as his native tongue. An introvert child afflicted with a stammer, Maugham was orphaned at 10 and went to live with his uncle, a vicar. Although...

William Makepeace Thackeray  ( 1811 – 1863) Thackeray was an English journalist, novelist, famous for his novel Vanity Fair (1847-48), a tale of two middle-class London families. Most of Thackeray’s major novels were published as monthly serials. Thackeray studied in a satirical and moralistic upper-middle-class English life – he was at one time considered the equal of his contemporary Dickens, or even as his superior. William Makepeace Thackeray was born in...

William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878 ) William Cullen Bryant was born at Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, November’ 3, 1794. In 1810, at the age of sixteen, he entered Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he studied for two years. In 1812 he withdrew from college and entered upon the study of law. After three years of preparation he was admitted to the bar in 1815. He practiced first at Plainfield,...

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) W B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright and one of the greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and was one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish literary renaissance. Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883-86). As a boy he attended school in London and spent vacations in County Sligo, Ireland,...

William Blake (1757 – 1827) William Blake was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake pro-claimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th- century. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognise his importance. Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life....