Famous poets in history

How these eleven poets were chosen

Poetry lists tend to be all English or all one country. This one mixes eight languages (Sanskrit, Italian, Middle English, Persian, Hindavi, Urdu, Bengali and modern English) because the poets on it shaped how millions of people talk, pray, sing and fall in love. Each one has a work you can read today in a good translation, often free.

For each poet: dates, what they wrote, the poem to start with, and a detail most lists leave out. Quotations come only from the poets’ own texts and letters, with the source given. Many lines shared online under Tagore’s, Ghalib’s or Dickinson’s names are not theirs; check before you use one.

Kalidasa (about 4th to 5th century CE): the master of Sanskrit

Kalidasa wrote the play Abhijnanashakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala), the lyric Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger), in which an exiled spirit sends a message to his wife by a monsoon cloud, and the epics Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava. His dates are unknown; most scholars place him in the 4th or 5th century CE, often linked to the Gupta court.

Start with: The Cloud Messenger. Most lists miss: Shakuntala was the first Sanskrit play translated into English, by William Jones in 1789, and it caused a sensation in Europe; Goethe wrote a short poem in its praise.

Dante Alighieri (1265 to 1321): the Divine Comedy

Dante was a Florentine politician exiled in 1302 under threat of death. In exile he wrote a hundred cantos describing his own passage through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, finishing shortly before he died in Ravenna in 1321.

Start with: Inferno, canto 1. Most lists miss: he called it simply the Commedia. The word “Divine” was added later, and appeared in a printed title in 1555. And he wrote it in the Tuscan Italian people spoke, not Latin, which helped make that dialect the basis of modern Italian.

Geoffrey Chaucer (about 1343 to 1400): The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer was a London customs official, diplomat and courtier who wrote in English when the English court still read French. The Canterbury Tales has a group of pilgrims telling stories on the road to Canterbury; it was left unfinished at his death.

Start with: the General Prologue. Most lists miss: he also wrote a science textbook. His Treatise on the Astrolabe (about 1391) explains the instrument in plain English for his young son Lewis, who was not yet good at Latin.

Amir Khusrau (1253 to 1325): Persian and Hindavi verse in Delhi

Amir Khusrau, born at Patiali to a Turkish father and an Indian mother, served a series of Delhi sultans as court poet and was a devoted follower of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, beside whose tomb he is buried. He wrote a huge body of Persian poetry and history, and verses in Hindavi, an early form of Hindi and Urdu.

Most lists miss: he called himself an “Indian Turk” and praised India above other lands in his poem Nuh Sipihr (1318). Many things credited to him, such as inventing the sitar, the tabla or qawwali, are later traditions without firm evidence.

William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616): the sonnets

William Shakespeare is best known for about 39 plays, but he was also a major poet: two long narrative poems in the 1590s and 154 sonnets, published in 1609.

Most lists miss: almost nothing survives of his own opinions outside the works, and only six signatures in his hand are known. Characters’ lines are not his personal beliefs. More: Shakespeare Day, April 23 and who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

Lord Byron (1788 to 1824): Childe Harold and Don Juan

Lord Byron became famous overnight in 1812 with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, left England under scandal in 1816, and wrote the long comic poem Don Juan in Italy. He died of fever at Missolonghi in 1824 while supporting the Greek war of independence.

Start with: “She Walks in Beauty” (1814). Most lists miss: his first speech in the House of Lords, on 27 February 1812, argued against making machine-breaking by starving Nottinghamshire weavers a crime punishable by death. His daughter was the mathematician Ada Lovelace.

Mirza Ghalib (1797 to 1869): the Urdu ghazal

Mirza Ghalib, born in Agra, lived most of his life in Delhi and wrote ghazals of dense wit and doubt in Urdu and Persian. He saw the end of the Mughal court and described the siege of Delhi in 1857 in a Persian diary, Dastanbuy.

Most lists miss: he thought his Persian poetry was his real achievement and his Urdu verse less important. Readers reversed that judgement. His chatty Urdu letters, which he said turned correspondence into conversation, are classics too.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 to 1849): “The Raven”

Edgar Allan Poe published “The Raven” in 1845 and became famous, though he stayed poor. He also wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and horror tales still read in every school.

Most lists miss: in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) he claimed he built “The Raven” step by step like a maths problem, choosing the length, the refrain “Nevermore” and the subject on purpose. Scholars doubt it was that tidy. He died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849; the cause is still unknown.

Emily Dickinson (1830 to 1886): nearly 1,800 poems

Emily Dickinson lived almost all her life in her family’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and wrote nearly 1,800 short poems full of dashes and slant rhyme. Only about ten were published in her lifetime, without her name.

Most lists miss: in April 1862 she wrote to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a stranger, asking whether her verse was alive. Their letters lasted until her death, and he co-edited the first book of her poems in 1890.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941): Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize

Rabindranath Tagore of Calcutta wrote poems, more than two thousand songs, novels, plays and essays in Bengali. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, mainly for the English Gitanjali (Song Offerings).

Most lists miss: he wrote the words and music of two national anthems, India’s “Jana Gana Mana” and Bangladesh’s “Amar Shonar Bangla”. More: the Nobel Prize stories of Curie and Tagore.

Sarojini Naidu (1879 to 1949): The Golden Threshold

Sarojini Naidu, born in Hyderabad, published The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917), lyrical English poems about Indian life and festivals. She then turned to politics, and in 1925 became the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress.

Most lists miss: as a student in England she was told by the critic Edmund Gosse to stop imitating English poets and write about India. She took the advice, and it made her name. In 1947 she became governor of the United Provinces, the first woman governor in India.

Summary table: poets, languages and first reads

Project ideas using famous poets

• Same feeling, five centuries: pick a theme such as separation, and compare how Kalidasa, Ghalib and Dickinson handle it, one short passage each.
• Fake quote check: find three “quotes” online credited to Tagore or Ghalib and trace them to a published book. Our guide on checking if a quote is real shows how.
• Recitation with context: learn eight lines of one poet and introduce them in one minute: who, when, why this poem. The first-person biography speech guide helps.
• Interview a poet: write ten questions and try them aloud with Emily Dickinson or Rabindranath Tagore on Yuga, which you can talk to by voice or text. The recreations draw on the poets’ writings and the record, but they are AI, not the real poets, and they can be wrong, so quote the poems and letters, never the app.

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