Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850. Yet today we have only a limited knowledge of her considerable life\"s work as a poet, in part because of a lack of representative but accessible editions of her work....

\"I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be\". wrote Byron (1788-1824) in his comic masterpiece Don Juan, which follows the adventures of the hero across the Europe and near East which Byron knew so well, touching on the major political, cultural and social concerns of the day....

Initially a vivacious, outgoing person, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) progressively withdrew into a reclusive existence. An undiscovered genius during her lifetime, only seven out of her total of 1,775 poems were published prior to her death....

Although Tennyson (1809-1892) has often seemed to personify the Victorian Age, he was a poet before it began and his poems endure to speak clearly to this modern one....

WILDE, GLAMOROUS AND NOTORIUS, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown and intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years includes the haunting elegy to his young sister and the grieving lyric at the death of his father....

Housman's melodic and memorable poems have been popular for over a century. He writes typically of lost love, of the brevity of happiness, of young soldiers doomed to die. Admirers have found his work elegant and resonant; detractors have thought much of it mannered and glib....

Robert Burns, the most celebrated of all Scottish poets, is remembered with great devotion - his birthday on 25th January provokes fervour and festivity among Scots and many others the world over. Born in 1759 into miserable rustic poverty, by the age of eighteen Burns had acquired a good knowledge of both classical and English literature....

William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets. His writing attracted the astonished admiration of authors as diverse as Wordsworth, Ruskin, W.B.Yeats, and more recently beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the ‘flower power’ generation....

W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting his 'very self' into his poems. T. S....

\"What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth\" So wrote the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in 1817....