Ezra Pound

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was... well-known and greatly admired throughout antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments. The only contemporary source for Sappho's life is her own poetry, and scholars are skeptical of reading it biographically. Later biographical accounts are also unreliable. Strabo indicates that Sappho was the contemporary of Alcaeus of Mytilene and Pittacus , and according to Athenaeus, she was the contemporary of Alyattes of Lydia . The Suda, a 10th century Byzantine encyclopædia, dates her to the 42nd Olympiad , meaning either that she was born then or that this was her floruit. The versions of Eusebius state that she was famous by the first or second year of the 45th or 46th Olympiad .
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Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, in the Seine-Maritime department... of Upper Normandy, in northern France. He was the second son of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert , a surgeon, and Anne Justine Caroline . He began writing at an early age, as early as eight according to some sources. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. and did not leave until 1840, when he went to Paris to study law. In Paris, he was an indifferent student and found the city distasteful. He made a few acquaintances, including Victor Hugo. Toward the close of 1840, he traveled in the Pyrenees and Corsica. In 1846, after an attack of epilepsy, he left Paris and abandoned the study of law. From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survive.
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century." Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The... poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion , The Waste Land , The Hollow Men , Ash Wednesday , and Four Quartets . He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot , was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis.
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William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his... early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850. The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together.
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William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of... medicine with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician" but excelled at both. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to the United States with her son, remarried, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son, Williams' father, married a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent. He received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He attended the Horace Mann School upon his return to New York City and after having passed a special examination, he was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1906. He published his first book, Poems, in 1909.
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Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental... in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now best remembered for The Good Soldier , the Parade's End tetralogy and The Fifth Queen trilogy . The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the past century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's '100 Greatest Novels of All Time', and The Guardian's '1000 novels everyone must read'. He was born as Ford Hermann Hueffer on 17 December 1873 to Catherine and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. He went by the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and in 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written.
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