Williams was born on July 21, 1952, in Chicago, the son of a Ford Motor Company executive. His parents were middle-aged when he was born and while both had grown children from previous marriages, Williams was raised as an only child and had much time alone with which to develop his imagination. One way in which he entertained himself was to memorize Jonathan Winters' comedy records. As his father rose amongst the Ford hierarchy, the Williams family moved frequently. Williams was a pudgy child and was often the new kid in the private schools where he received his education. Much of his quick humor developed as a defense mechanism against the teasing he endured. His father retired during Williams' senior year in high school and permanently settled the family in Marin County, CA. Williams finally found a niche at school, and by the time he graduated, he was physically fit, popular, and voted the funniest and most likely to succeed.

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Auden was born in York and spent his early childhood in Harborne, Birmingham, where his father Dr George Auden was the school medical officer for Birmingham and Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. From the age of eight Auden was sent away to boarding schools, first in Surrey and later Norfolk, but he returned to Birmingham for the holidays.

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Two songs by him are included in Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, and in 1683 appeared Thealma and Clearchus. A Pastoral History in smooth and easie Verse. Written long since by John Chalkhill, Esq., an Acquaintant and Friend of Edmund Spencer (1683), with a preface written five years earlier by Walton.

Another poem, Aldilia, Philoparthens Loving Follie (1595, reprinted in vol. x. of the Jahrbuch des deutschen Shakespeare-Vereins), was at one time attributed to him. Nothing further is known of the poet, but a person with the same name is recorded as one of the coroners for Middlesex in the later years of Elizabeth I's reign.

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MILES CHAMPION, born in Nottingham in 1968, studied Social Anthropology at Manchester University. He now lives in London. He has performed his poetry in the United States and Britain, participating in the 1995 Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. His poems were included in New Poetries (Carcanet, 1994) and Exact Change Yearbook. A chapbook, Sore Models, was published by Sound & Language in 1995.

A player from the bached norse team Wotans Rache. Now he join the dark side, the problem is that he is not a poet. He is a wannabie poet.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1771, the son of a Scottish solicitor of limited means, the young Walter Scott survived a childhood bout of polio that would leave him lame in his right leg for the rest of his life. To restore his health he was sent to live for some years in the rural Scottish Borders district with his grandparents. Here he learned the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends which characterized much of his work. Also, for his health, he spent a year in Bath, England.

He also learned by heart James Macpherson's Ossian poems, which it was claimed at the time were translations dating back to the Dark Ages, but later discredited when this was found to be untrue.

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He was the son of Edward Young, afterwards dean of Salisbury, and was born at his father's rectory at Upham, near Winchester, where he was baptized on July 3, 1683. He was educated at Winchester College, and matriculated in 1702 at New College, Oxford. He later moved to Corpus Christi, and in 1708 was nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law fellowship at All Souls'. He took his degree of D.C.L. in 1719. His first publication was an Epistle to ... Lord Lansdoune (1713). It was followed by a Poem on the Last Day (1713), dedicated to Queen Anne; The Force of Religion: or Vanquished Love (1714), a poem on the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury; and an epistle to Joseph Addison, On the late Queen's Death and His Majesty's Accession to the Throne (1714), in which he rushed to praise the new king. The fulsome style of the dedications jars with the pious tone of the poems, and they are omitted from his own edition of his works.

He was born in Lincolnshire, a rector's son. His father had fallen out with his family and been disinherited; he drank heavily and became mentally unstable. Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens, and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only seventeen. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner, later married Louisa Sellwood, younger sister of Alfred's future wife; the other poet brother was Frederick Tennyson. Educated at Louth grammar school and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the secret society called the Cambridge Apostles, Alfred Tennyson published his first solo collection of poems in 1830. Although decried by critics as over-sentimental, his verse soon proved popular. One of his best-known poems, The Lady of Shalott, appeared in his second collection in 1833.


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Reznikoff was born in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn, New York of Russian parents. After a year studying journalism, he entered the law school of New York University in 1912 and graduated in 1916. He practised law briefly and entered officer training school in 1918, but failed to see active service before the end of the war.

Reznikoff worked for a time for his family's business as a hat salesman. He then worked for a legal publishing house where he wrote summaries of court records for legal reference books. This experience was to prove important for his later writing.

From his teens, Reznikoff had been writing poetry, much of it influenced by the Imagists, and publishing it himself using handset printing plates. Throughout his writing life, Reznikoff was always concerned to ensure that his work was published, even at his own expense. This appears to have been inspired by a family story of his grandfather, an unpublished Hebrew poet whose manuscripts were destroyed after his death.


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E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Edward and Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings. Cummings' father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University and later a Unitarian minister. Raised in a liberal family, Cummings was writing poetry as early as 1904 (age 10). His only sibling, a sister, Elizabeth, was born six years after he was.

In his youth Cummings attended the Cambridge Latin High School. Many of his early stories and poems were published in the Cambridge Review, the school newspaper.


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Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, the son of a vicar. After the death of his father, he was sent to Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in West Sussex. In later life, Coleridge idealised his father as a pious innocent, but his relationship with his mother was difficult. His childhood was characterised by attention-seeking, which has been linked with his dependent personality as an adult, and he was rarely allowed to return home during his schooldays. From 1791 until 1794 he attended Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, except for a short period when he enlisted in the royal dragoons. At the university he met political and theological ideas then considered radical.


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He belonged to an Oxfordshire family, and is said to have been educated at Cambridge, but Dennis assures us that to his certain knowledge he understood neither Greek nor Latin. He travelled abroad early, and seems to have resided in France. It is possible that he witnessed in Paris the performances of some of Molière's earliest comedies; and he is thought, from an allusion in one of his plays, to have been personally acquainted with Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy.

On his return to London he studied the law at one of the Inns of Court. His tastes were those of a fine gentleman, and he in- dulged freely in pleasure. Soon after the Restoration he composed his comedy of The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub, which introduced him to Lord Buckhurst, afterwards the earl of Dorset. This was performed at the Duke's theatre in 1664, and a few copies were printed in the same year. It is partly in rhymned heroic verse, like the stilted tragedies of the Howards and Killigrews, but it contains comic scenes that are exceedingly bright and fresh. The sparring between Sir Frederick and the Widow introduced a style of wit hitherto unknown upon the English stage.

The success of this play was very great, but Etheredge waited four years before he repeated his experiment. Meanwhile he gained the highest reputation as a poetical beau, and moved in the circle of Sir Charles Sedley, Lord Rochester and the other noble wits of the day. In 1668 he brought out She would if she could, a comedy in many respects admirable, full of action, wit and spirit, although to the last degree frivolous and immoral. But in this play Etheredge first shows himself a new power in literature; he has nothing of the rudeness of his predecessors or the grossnessof his contemporaries. We move in an airy and fantastic world, where flirtation is the only serious business of life. At this time Etheredge was living a life no less frivolous and unprincipled than those of his Courtals and Freemans. He formed an alliance with the famous actress Mrs Elizabeth Barry; she bore him a daughter, on whom he settled £6000, but who, unhappily, died in her youth.

He was born at Whitton, in the parish of Twickenham, Middlesex, and baptized there on February 10, 1609. His father was Sir John Suckling, a courtier. The poet inherited his father's fortune at the age of eighteen. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1623, and was entered at Gray's Inn in 1627. He was intimate with Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Nabbes and especially with John Hales and Sir William Davenant, who later furnished John Aubrey with information about his friend.

In 1628 he left London to travel in France and Italy, returning before the autumn of 1630, when he was knighted. In 1631 he volunteered for the force raised by the marquess of Hamilton to serve under Gustavus Adolphus in Germany. He was back at Whitehall in May 1632; but during his short service he had been present at the Battle of Breitenfeld and in many sieges. His poetic talent was only one of many accomplishments, but it commended him especially to Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria. He says of himself ("A Sessions of the Poets") that he "prized black eyes or a lucky hit at bowls above all the trophies of wit." He was the best card-player and the best bowler at court. Aubrey says that he invented the game of cribbage, and relates that his sisters came weeping to the bowling green at Piccadilly to dissuade him from play, fearing that he would lose their portions.

In 1634 great scandal was caused in his old circle by a beating which he received at the hands of Sir John Digby, a rival suitor for the hand of the daughter of Sir John Willoughby; and it has been suggested that this incident, which is narrated at length in a letter (November 10, 1634) from George Garrard to Strafford, had something to do with his beginning to seek more serious society. In 1635 he retired to his country estates in obedience to the proclamation of June 20, 1632 enforced by the Star Chamber against absentee landlordism, and employed his leisure in literary pursuits. In 1637 "A Sessions of the Poets" was circulated in manuscript, and about the same time he wrote a tract on Socinianism entitled An Account of Religion by Reason (pr. 1646).



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