Homer was a Greek poet who is said to have lived before 700 B.C. Currently he is placed as living in Asia Minor in Chios or Smyrna. Little is truely known about him though legend says he was blind. He is a folk hero in Greece and the study of his poetry is common practice in Greece. A true powerhouse of poetry.

Great Works-The Illiad/Odyssey

The other ancient poetry knockout punch. Virgil was a follower of Homer and wrote in his style, the epic poem. He even adapted the same poetic meter, Datyllic Hexameter, for use in his work. He lived in Rome during the reign of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. After the turbulance of the civil war era, the emperor wanted a great patriotic epic to symbolize the new Rome and to start the new Pax Romana. Virgil wrote the Aeneid at this request. But he wrote a lot of poetry before that idealizing Roman rural life.

Great Works-Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid

Full name-Publius Ovidius Naso
Ovid made one big mistake in his life. He lived in Rome, was a poet under the patronage of the Emperor and then he decided to go and write about how the Emperor's daughter was a hoe in one of his books. Ars Amatoria to be exact, the art of love. That lead to this erotic bad boy of poetry to be exiled to the Black Sea. A versatile poet, writing about love and mythology with consumate ease.

Great Works-Metamorphoses, Ars Amatoria, Amores, Epistulae Heroidum, Tristia

Catullus is one of the best lyrical poets ever. He composed a hundred and so poems adressing the theme of love and they are considered some of the most poignant, wonderful pieces on the subject. They are adressed to a certain Lesbia, though some think that that was pseudonym for Clodia, sister of a leading Roman politician. She is portrayed as a woman of class and wealth in the poems so the assesment might not be wrong.

She was a woman with many other lovers though and Catullus's tender loving tone in his earlier work is overtaken with sorrow, disillusionment, and hatred. He also wrote viciously satirical epigrams and a few longer works.

Great Works-Numerous poems, famous ones include "I Love and I Hate" "On the Death of Lesbia's Sparrow" and "Hail brother, and farewell". "Attis"

More of an essayist and philospher than a poet, he wrote a few sonnets. Sir Francis Bacon was a politican in the Elizabethean times, a respected man who held many positions. Eventually he was tried for corruption, fined, and never allowed into public service again. He lived out the rest of his life as an intellectual, writing sonnets, essays, and philosphical and scientific treatises.

Great Works-Essays, New Atlantis, De Augmentus Scientarum, Novum Organum

Famous writer of horror. He had a troubled life, both of his parents died when he was 3 and he lived with his grandfather. He was schooled in England but taken home and enrolled in the University of Virginia only to leave because of gambling debts. He drank heavily and became a scathing critic. On the side he wrote truely mysterious and macabre short stories. It his book "The Raven and other Poems" that allows him entry into the ranks of the Deceased Poets, it was a great compilation winning him fame here and abroad.

Great Poetic Works-"The Raven and other Poems"

Irish playwright and poet. He was a flamboyant man with a taste for everything beautiful. He was satirized and generally made fun of for his aesthetic pleasures by his collegues. That did not diminish his literary achievmants though, he wrote a number of poems and plays. He took a male lover and when the father found out he spread a vicious series of rumours and slander about him. When Wilde foolishly tried to take the man to court for slander, he was charged and tried for homosexual practices and jailed.

Peniless, friendless, he died in France under an assumed name.

Great Works-Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Earnest, Poems

James Joyce is more known for his utterly incomprehensible to the normal mortal literary funhouses called "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake". He lived in Dublin in the early 1900's and suffered under the essential bigotry of the system there at the time. Many of his works were scorned and otherwise derided and even now are more often talked about than read. But he wrote poetry, and thus he is a Deceased Poet meeting all requirements for the society.

Great Works-"Ulysses", "Finnegan's Wake", "A Potrait of an Artist as a Young Man", "Pomes Pennyeach", "Collected Poems"