#8901
Jure Kaštelan
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Juraj "Jure" Kaštelan was a Croatian poet and writer. Education and career Juraj "Jure" Kaštelan was born on 18 December 1919 in Zakučac in Dalmatia. He attended primary school in Split and then matriculated to the Zagreb Faculty of Arts, but the war interrupted his studies. In 1942 he joined the National Liberation Struggle and worked with the Partisan press. After the war, he completed his degree in Slavic languages and worked as a reporter for the newspaper Vjesnik, as an editor for a publishing company called “Nopok,” and then as the assistant Chair of the department of Yugoslav literature at the Faculty of Arts in Zagreb.
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Milada Součková
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Milada Součková was a Czech writer, literary historian, and diplomat. She is known mainly for introducing to Czech literature Modernist techniques employed by English-language writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
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Ole Edvart Rølvaag
1876 - 1931 (55 years)
Ole Edvart Rølvaag was a Norwegian-American novelist and professor who became well known for his writings regarding the Norwegian American immigrant experience. Ole Rolvaag is most frequently associated with Giants in the Earth, his award-winning, epic novel of Norwegian immigrant homesteaders in Dakota Territory.
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Alaíde Foppa
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Alaíde Foppa was a Guatemalan poet, writer, feminist, art critic, teacher and translator. Born in Barcelona, Spain she held Guatemalan citizenship and lived in exile in Mexico. She worked as a professor in both Guatemala and Mexico. Much of her poetry was published in Mexico and she co-founded one of the first feminist publications, Fem, in the country. After her husband's death, she made a trip to Guatemala to see her mother and renew her passport. She was detained and disappeared in Guatemala City on 19 December 1980, presumed to be murdered. Some sources note the date of her disappearance ...
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Jun Ishikawa
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Jun Ishikawa was the pen name of a modernist author, translator and literary critic active in Shōwa period Japan. His real name was Ishikawa Kiyoshi. Early life Ishikawa was born in the Asakusa district of Tokyo as the son of a banker. He graduated from the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages with a degree in French literature. After graduation, he served a tour of duty in the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1922 to 1923, following which he was hired by Fukuoka University as a professor of French literature. His early career involved translating works such as Anatole France's Le lys rouge and auth...
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F. W. Dupee
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Frederick Wilcox Dupee was a distinguished American literary critic, essayist for Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books, and professor of English at Columbia University. He evolved from radical Marxist penning political essays to highly respected literary critic.
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George Edward Woodberry
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
George Edward Woodberry, Litt. D., LL. D. was an American literary critic and poet. Biography Education Woodberry was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1855. The Woodberrys or Woodburys—various spellings of the name exist—immigrated early and, since settlement took root on the North Shore, have been native to Beverly and neighboring seaport towns. Receiving his preparation at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he entered Harvard College in 1872. He was unable to finish his class, though, due to his poor health. He returned in 1875, and he earned his degree in 1877. Woodberry took highest final honors in philosophy, and was awarded an Oration at Commencement.
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Antônio da Silva Mello
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Antônio da Silva Mello , best known as A. da Silva Mello was a Brazilian physician and writer. Biography Mello was born in Juiz de Fora. He studied at the Granbery Institute and then joined the Medical School of Rio de Janeiro, where he attended until the third year, when he moved to Berlin, graduating in 1914. He specialized in clinical medicine, publishing scientific papers on the subject. He wrote on epidemiology, immunity, metabolism, nephrology, nutrition and psychology.
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Yone Noguchi
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He is known in the west as Yone Noguchi. He was the father of noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
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Albrecht Dieterich
1866 - 1908 (42 years)
Albrecht Dieterich was a German classical philologist and scholar of religion born in Hersfeld. Academic background He studied at the Universities of Leipzig and Bonn, where at the latter he was a student of Hermann Usener , who in 1899 became Dieterich's father-in-law. In 1888 he earned his doctorate, and three years later received his habilitation in Marburg with a dissertation on Orphism. Afterwards he traveled to Italy and Greece for research purposes. In 1895 he returned to Marburg as an associate professor, and two years later succeeded Eduard Schwartz as chair of classical philology at the University of Giessen.
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Richard Ellmann
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce , which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
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Ricardo Carballo
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Ricardo Carballo Calero , self-styled as Ricardo Carvalho Calero from 1981 onward, was a Spanish philologist, academic and writer. He was the first Professor of Galician Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He was a member of the Royal Galician Academy, the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and also an honorary member of the Galician Language Association. He was one of the main theorists of contemporary Galician reintegrationism and his works on this field are considered a primary reference. Many consider Carballo Calero as one of the most prominent figures of the twe...
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Marion Clinch Calkins
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Marion Clinch Calkins was an American poet, writer, and teacher who taught English and Art History at the University of Wisconsin and wrote about the labor movement, industrial espionage, and fascism in America.
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Theodor Birt
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Theodor Birt was a German classicist and novelist. He also used the name of the Humanist Beatus Rhenanus as a pseudonym. Life Birt's ancestors came from Pennsylvania and had been settled in Germany for three generations. Birt's father intended for him to become a shopkeeper but allowed his musically talented son to attend the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums, a gymnasium in Hamburg, for three years where Johannes Classen and Adolf Kiessling were his teachers. From 1872, Birt studied classics, at first for a year in Leipzig, and then in Bonn under Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler. From the time he completed his studies he remained at the University of Marburg.
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Ernst Kalinka
1865 - 1946 (81 years)
Ernst Kalinka was an Austrian classical philologist and archaeologist. He is considered to be a typical representative of the erstwhile Viennese school of classical studies, in which, the disciplines of philology, epigraphy and archaeology were intertwined as an inseparable unity.
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Axel Kock
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Karl Axel Lichnowsky Kock was a Swedish philologist, professor of Scandinavian languages at Lund University 1907-1916. Kock was born in a merchant family in Trelleborg, but lost both parents at an early age and was raised in the home of the Tegnér family in the university town of Lund, where he became friends with Esaias Tegnér Jr. He studied in Lund and Strassburg, finished both his licentiate and doctorate degrees in 1879 and became a university docent of Scandinavian languages the same year. He was professor of Scandinavian languages at Gothenburg University 1890-1893 and served as rector of the university in 1891.
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Irving Babbitt
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Irving Babbitt was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 and 1930. He was a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and a consistent opponent of romanticism, as represented by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politically he can, without serious distortion, be called a follower of Aristotle and Edmund Burke. He was an advocate of classical humanism but also offered an ecumenical defense of religion.
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Franz Nikolaus Finck
1867 - 1910 (43 years)
Franz Nikolaus Finck was a German philologist, born in Krefeld. He was a professor of General Linguistics at the University of Berlin. Finck visited the Aran Islands of Ireland, where he lived with speakers of Irish Gaelic. His research on the phonology of Irish resulted in the book Die araner mundart: ein beitrag zur erforschung des westirischen . This work was characteristic of Finck's emphasis on the study of remote dialects of languages.
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Margaret Deland
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Margaret Deland was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She also wrote an autobiography in two volumes. She generally is considered part of the literary realism movement. Biography Margaretta Wade Campbell was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on February 23, 1857. Her mother died due to complications from the birth, and she was left in the care of an aunt named Lois Wade and her husband Benjamin Campbell Blake.
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William Shakespeare
1564 - 1616 (52 years)
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" . His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the En...
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Homer
900 BC - 800 BC (100 years)
Homer was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history.
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Ovid
43 BC - 17 (60 years)
Publius Ovidius Naso , known in English as Ovid , was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his ban...
Go to ProfileHesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by Western authors as 'the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject.' Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought, Archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.
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Virgil
70 BC - 19 BC (51 years)
Publius Vergilius Maro , usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.
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Euripides
480 BC - 406 BC (74 years)
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete . There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declinedhe became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient...
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T. S. Eliot
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His trials in language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
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John Milton
1608 - 1674 (66 years)
John Milton was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
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Ezra Pound
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes , Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos .
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Jorge Luis Borges
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known books, and , published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
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Dante Alighieri
1265 - 1321 (56 years)
Dante Alighieri , most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
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Aeschylus
525 BC - 456 BC (69 years)
Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
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Sophocles
496 BC - 406 BC (90 years)
Sophocles was an ancient Greek tragedian, known as one of three from whom at least one play has survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia.
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William Blake
1757 - 1827 (70 years)
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
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Oscar Wilde
1854 - 1900 (46 years)
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772 - 1834 (62 years)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.
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Edgar Allan Poe
1809 - 1849 (40 years)
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writin...
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J. R. R. Tolkien
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings.
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George Bernard Shaw
1856 - 1950 (94 years)
George Bernard Shaw , known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman , Pygmalion and Saint Joan . With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Horace
65 BC - 8 BC (57 years)
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , commonly known in the English-speaking world as Horace , was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus . The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."
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John Keats
1795 - 1821 (26 years)
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life.
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Charles Dickens
1812 - 1870 (58 years)
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.
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Walt Whitman
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
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William Wordsworth
1770 - 1850 (80 years)
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads . Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".
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Lord Byron
1788 - 1824 (36 years)
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron was an Anglo-Scottish romantic poet. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of Scottish poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Ralph Waldo Emerson , who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master".
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Geoffrey Chaucer
1343 - 1400 (57 years)
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 - 1822 (30 years)
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advance...
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Rudyard Kipling
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology , Kim , the Just So Stories and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" . His poems include "Mandalay" , "Gunga Din" , "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" , "The White Man's Burden" , and "If—" . He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".
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Pindar
517 BC - 437 BC (80 years)
Pindar was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable." His poems can also, however, seem difficult and even peculiar. The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis once remarked that they "are already reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning".
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James Joyce
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners , and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake . His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, a...
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