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BIOGRAFY

William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street in Soho, London on 28 November 1757. His father James Blake was a hosier. He and his wife Catherine had 6 children. From an early age William Blake was artistic. When he was 14 William was made apprentice to an engraver called James Basire. William served 7 years and became an engraver himself in 1779. Blake also wanted to paint and the same year he became a student at the Royal Academy of Arts.

On 18 August 1782 William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher . Blake also wrote poems. A book of poems called Poetical Sketches was published in 1783. In 1789 he published a book of poems called The Song of Innocence. In 1793 Blake published Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Great Poet In 1794 Blake published a book of poems called Songs of Experience. It included the famous poem The Tiger. In 1794 William Blake published Europe, a Prophecy. In 1820 Blake painted The Goblin. He also painted a miniature called The Ghost of a Flea. In 1825 Blake was commissioned illustrate Divine Comedy by Dante but he died before he could complete the task. William Blake died on 12 August 1827 and he was buried in Bunhill Fields in London.
POEM: The Tyger
COMMENT
Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence.
The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world.  The poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is being forged.
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either.

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BIOGRAFY
On April 7, 1770, William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England. Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight and this experience shapes much of his later work. Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of poetry was firmly established and, it is believed, he made his first attempts at verse. While he was at Hawkshead, Wordsworth's father died leaving him and his four siblings orphans. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John's College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry and his political sensibilities. While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution.  In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and they had five children together. In 1812, while living in Grasmere, two of their children—Catherine and John—died. Equally important in the poetic life of Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions. Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in 1847, Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems. William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.
POEM: Daffodils
COMMENT
The poem Daffodils by Wordsworth, written in 1804 and published in 1807, recounts the experience of a walk the poet went for with his sister, near their home in the Lake District. Wordsworth is reminiscing when he saw a great quantity of daffodils which made him feel happy and in contact with nature the flowers are personified, in fact they are described as a dancing crowd whose beauty is superior to everything else. He is looking back on how much of an impression it has had on him. This poem is a clear example of Romantic poetry for its naturalistic theme. Nature was for Wordsworth a protection and the clear manifestation of God. All nature appears wonderfully alive and happy in fact the cloud floats on high. The key of the poem is joy, as we can see from the many words which express pleasure and delight: in fact the daffodils  provide a jocund company and the sight of them fills the poet’s heart with pleasure.Wordsworth uses many metaphors, similes and personifications (for example the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and "tossing their heads" in "a crowd, a host").

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BIOGRAFY
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools. At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841.  He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander.  In 1848, Whitman co-founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman.  At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City–area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D. C. in December 1862 to care for his brother, who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals.  In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed.  After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.
POEM: O Captain! my Captain!
COMMENT
Whitman wrote this poem shortly after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. It is an extended metaphor intended to memorialize Lincoln's life and work. The Captain represents the assassinated president; the ship represents the war-weathered nation following the Civil War; the "prize won" represents the salvaged union. It was a time of many conflicting sentiments, and Whitman immortalizes this sense of uncertainty in "O Captain! My Captain!". The main visual image of the poem is a celebration as a ship comes into its port. The image of the dead captain on the cold deck contrasts with the first scene in order to place emotional emphasis on his death. The auditory imagery is of bells ringing, while they appear to be fun celebration festivities, they are described harshly, in order to signify the captain’s death.
Upon first read, the title makes it seem like the poem is about a sailor talking to a captain. But when it is analysed, it becomes obvious that the poem actually is a cry of sorrow mourning the death of Abraham Lincoln.

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BIOGRAFY
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri,  on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.
After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.
POEM: The Hollow Men
COMMENT
The ‘Hollow Men’ of the poem are themselves trapped in some sort of between-world, a limbo or purgatory between death and life, existence and nothingness, light and darkness. In five sections, Eliot lets the collective voice of the Hollow Men address us from their between-world which is at once a desert space (‘cactus land’) and a place suggestive of internal decay, as though the end of the world or even the universe has come. And indeed, when we reach the final lines of the poem, we are told that we are witnessing the end of the world, which happens anticlimactically, with a whimper rather than a bang.This moment is filled with religious significance – as the allusions to the the Lord’s Prayer suggest – but any attempt at prayer is only half-formed and half-achieved.

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BIOGRAFY

On August 9, 1922, Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England. He attended St. John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later work.
With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for Neo-romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas . Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.
Deeply anti-social and a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and worked as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died on December 2, 1985.
POEM: Annus Mirabilis
COMMENT
The idea that “sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three” is an exaggeration, and this shocking phrase that starts off the poem is designed to hook the reader.There are references to events which defined the new spirit of the sexual freedom. D.H Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley was a novel that was seen as pornographic and had been banned on grounds of obscenity, while the Beatles were the markers for a  change from conservative Britain to a permissive society. Larkin contrasts previous years, in which sexual intercourse was a source of "shame" that caused "bargaining" between the sexes and could only be achieved by a marriage.