W.H. Auden

Went to Oxford

Poet famous from 1930s-1970s

Married (for reasons of citizenship) but homosexual and wrote some famous love poems

Rupert Brooke

A poet famous prior to WW1

Died in 1915 in service in Greece

Famous for a relatively small selection of sonnets about the war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge1772-1834

Romantic poet

Wrote poetry about nature and myths and legends (typical Romantic themes)

Was once disturbed by a knock on the door and never finished his most famous poem!

Frances Cornford

Charles Darwin’s granddaughter

Won the Queen’s medal for poetry in 1959, died in 1960

Wrote about childhood, about life, about Rupert Brooke…

Kenneth Grahame

Scottish writer

Wrote the Wind in the Willows

T S Eliot

American modernist poet (died in 1965)

Won the Noble Prize for literature in 1948

His poetry was about gender roles, the human psyche, literary history

Robert Graves

Served in WW1, but lived until 1985

Taught at Oxford, as well as writing numerous novels, poems and essays

Thomas Hardy

Lived from 1840-1925

One of the most famous British novelists and poets

Was quite controversial due to the ‘salacious’ themes in his novels

A E Housman

A poet of the British countryside

Traditional style, odes and ballads about landscapes

Was taught at Oxford, taught at Cambridge

Franz Kafka

Czech writer (born in Prague)

Created surreal, nightmarish worlds for his characters

Rudyard Kipling

Born in India so often wrote about imperialism (Jungle Book)

His son died in WW1 after Kipling had fought on his behalf to get him into the army

Philip Larkin

Northerner, Cambridge educated

Formal style and structure as a poet, but modern and shocking themes in his poems

John Milton

1608-1674 - perhaps the most famous 17th Century writer

Wrote ‘Paradise Lost’, about the battle between Heaven and Hell

Friedrich Nietzche

19th Century German philosopher

Questioned traditional morality and influenced existentialism

George Orwell

Wrote Animal Farm and 1984 (Big Brother)

Was very concerned about the correct use of the English language

The ideals of socialism influenced his life

Wilfred Owen

Became a famous poet during and after WW1

Was very critical of the war, but served for 3 years as an officer and returned twice

Blaise Pascal

French 17th Century scientist and philosopher

Wrote: “The heart has its reasons that reason knoweth not”

Plato 429-347 BC

Student of Socrates, perhaps the most famous Greek philosopher Proponent of the ‘dialectic’ teaching strategy – discussion, rhetoric

Homosexual

Marcel Proust

French author

Semi-autobiographical novel (The Remembrance of Things Past) his most famous work

Scarred by his childhood

J D Salinger

1919-2010

Most famous work is ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, about a runaway boy who goes to New York

Siegfried Sassoon

Soldier in WW1 (nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’)

Suffered from shell shock and reflected on the war in later life (died in 1967)

Wrote a poem called ‘Suicide in the Trenches’

William Shakespeare

Renaissance playwright

Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost & Antony and Cleopatra all quoted in ‘The History Boys’

Oscar Wilde

Anglo-Irish playwright

Arrested and charged with ‘gross indecency’ for his homosexual acts

Virginia Woolf

British novelist and essayist (1882-1941)

A modernist writer who used a ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative style

Walt Whitman

American poet (1819-1892)

Was very controversial in his time, with some of his work described as ‘obscene’

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Austrian-British philosopher

Considered complex issues such as the human psyche and logic

Stevie Smith British poet, considered a unique voice due to her satirical style

Poetry was about themes such as death and alienation, but often used a humorous tone