Evergreen Classics

The World of English poetry

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1564. He was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays,154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. (1564-1616)

William Blake (1757 – 1827) English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) Newton (1795) Ancient of Days

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) He was a major English Romantic poet who helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. Fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) Robert Burns (1759-1796) He was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and after his death became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) Henry Longfellow was an American educator and poet whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and "Evangeline". He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Longfellow mostly wrote lyric poems which are known for their musicality and which often presented stories of mythology and legend.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) He was a British author and poet. Born in Bombay, British India (now Mumbai), he is best known for his works of fiction The Jungle Book (1894) (a collection of stories which includes Rikki-Tikki-Tavi), Kim (1901) (a tale of adventure), many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888); and his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) He was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic. 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. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today.

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) He was an American poet and playwright. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) He was an American journalist, poet, literary critic, lecturer and editor. Kilmer is remembered most for a poem entitled Trees (1913), which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. While most of his works are unknown, a select few of his poems remain popular and are published frequently in anthologies. A sergeant in the 165th U.S. Infantry Regiment, Kilmer was killed at the Second Battle of Marne in 1918 at the age of 31.

JRR Tolkien (1892 – 1973) John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when they were published in paperback in the United States led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature. Tolkien's writings have inspired many other works of fantasy and have had a lasting effect on the entire field. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of 'The 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Tolkien's monogram

Children’s Writers and Poets

Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898) Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. There are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world including United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. Stevenson is ranked the 25th most translated author in the world

Alan Alexander Milne (1882 – 1956) Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. The real stuffed toys owned by Christopher Robin Milne and featured in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. They are on display in the Donnell Library Center in New York.

Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, born in Wales of Norwegian parents. After service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace, he rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors. His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour. Some of his most popular books include The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches and The BFG.

Spike Milligan (1918 – 2002) Terence Alan Patrick Seán Milligan, known as Spike Milligan, was an Anglo-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet and playwright. Aside from comedy, Milligan played the trumpet, saxophone, piano, guitar and bass drum. Milligan also wrote verse, considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. His poetry has been described as "absolutely immortal - greatly in the tradition of Lear". His most famous poem, On the Ning Nang Nong, was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll, ahead of other nonsense poets including Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. This nonsense verse, set to music, became a favourite Australia-wide, performed week after week by the ABC children's programme Playschool.

Jack Prelutsky Jack Prelutsky (born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 8, 1940) is the author of more than 50 poetry collections including Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (1976), The Mean Old Mean Hyena (1978), and Something BIG Has Been Here (1990). He has also compiled numerous children's anthologies comprising poems of others. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife, Carolyn.He has also set his poems to music on the audio versions of his anthologies. He often sings and plays guitar on most of them. In 2006, the Poetry Foundation named Prelutsky the inaugural winner of the Children’s Poet Laureate award.

Russian Poets, translated into English

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) Aleksandr Blok (1880 - 1921) Boris Pasternak (1890 - 1960) Nikolai Gumilyov (1886 - 1921)