Virgil

Poet · b. 800 BC

Homer was the legendary ancient Greek poet to whom the great epics the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed, foundational works of Western literature.

• The Iliad
• The Odyssey

Why Virgil modelled the Aeneid on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Emperor · 63 BC – 14

Augustus was the first Roman emperor, the heir of Julius Caesar who ended a century of civil war, established the Roman Empire, and inaugurated the Pax Romana.

• First Roman emperor
• The Pax Romana

Why Virgil wrote under the patronage of the emperor Augustus, glorifying Rome's destiny.

Poet · 1265 – 1321

Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet of the late Middle Ages whose masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is considered one of the greatest works of world literature and helped establish the Italian language.

• The Divine Comedy
• Inferno

Why Dante chose Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy.

Poet · 1608 – 1674

John Milton was an English poet and political writer of the 17th century whose epic Paradise Lost is considered the greatest long poem in the English language and one of the supreme achievements of world literature.

• Paradise Lost
• Areopagitica

Why Also a poet & writer · Comparable historical impact

Poet · 1830 – 1886

Emily Dickinson was an American poet who lived in near-seclusion and published almost nothing in her lifetime, yet whose nearly 1,800 original, compressed poems made her, after her death, one of the most important poets in the English language.

• Nearly 1,800 poems
• Reclusive life

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Poet · 1343 – 1400

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet and civil servant of the 14th century, called the "Father of English literature", whose Canterbury Tales established English as a language worthy of great poetry.

• The Canterbury Tales
• Father of English literature

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Writer · 1749 – 1832

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, poet, and statesman, widely regarded as the greatest figure in German literature and one of the towering minds of European culture.

• Faust
• The Sorrows of Young Werther

Why Also a writer & poet · Comparable historical impact

Poet · 1795 – 1821

John Keats was an English Romantic poet who, despite dying at just 25, produced some of the most beautiful and enduring poetry in the language, including a series of great odes that secured his place among the immortals of English verse.

• Ode to a Nightingale
• Ode on a Grecian Urn

Why Also a poet & writer · Comparable historical impact

Poet · 1788 – 1824

Lord Byron was an English Romantic poet, one of the most famous and scandalous figures of his age, whose works such as Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage created the brooding "Byronic hero" and made him a celebrity across Europe.

• Don Juan
• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

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Poet · 1792 – 1822

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet, among the greatest lyric poets in the language, whose visionary and politically radical verse — including Ozymandias and Prometheus Unbound — influenced generations of poets and reformers.

• Ozymandias
• Prometheus Unbound

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Writer · 1861 – 1941

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, writer, composer and polymath who reshaped Indian literature and music and, in 1913, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• Gitanjali
• Nobel Prize in Literature 1913

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Writer · 1865 – 1936

Rudyard Kipling was a British writer and poet, author of The Jungle Book and the poem "If—", who became the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, though his association with British imperialism has made his legacy contested.

• The Jungle Book
• If—

Why Also a writer & poet · Comparable historical impact

Poet · 630 BC – 570 BC

Sappho was an ancient Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, celebrated in antiquity as one of the greatest of all poets and revered for her intimate, intensely personal verse on love and longing.

• Lyric love poetry
• The 'Tenth Muse'

Why Also a poet & writer · Comparable historical impact

Novelist · 1802 – 1885

Victor Hugo was a French novelist, poet, and dramatist, the towering figure of French Romanticism, whose novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame are monuments of world literature.

• Les Misérables
• The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Why Also a poet & writer · Comparable historical impact

Poet · 1819 – 1892

Walt Whitman was an American poet whose collection Leaves of Grass broke from traditional verse to celebrate democracy, the body and the self in sweeping free verse, making him a founding father of modern American poetry.

• Leaves of Grass
• Free verse

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Poet · 1865 – 1939

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a driving force of the Irish Literary Revival, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and helped found Ireland's national theatre.

• The Second Coming
• Irish Literary Revival

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Poet · 1770 – 1850

William Wordsworth was an English poet who, with the Lyrical Ballads, helped launch the Romantic movement in English literature, celebrating nature, memory and ordinary life in language closer to common speech.

• Lyrical Ballads
• The Prelude

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Writer · 1809 – 1849

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer and poet, a master of the macabre, who invented the detective story, helped shape the modern short story and science fiction, and gave the world haunting tales and poems such as "The Raven".

• The Raven
• Detective fiction

Why Also a writer & poet · Comparable historical impact

Philosopher · 1844 – 1900

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose radical critiques of morality, religion, and truth—including the proclamation that "God is dead" and the ideal of the Übermensch—made him one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the modern era.

• "God is dead"
• The Übermensch

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Novelist · 1819 – 1891

Herman Melville was an American novelist and poet whose Moby-Dick, neglected in his lifetime, is now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written and a towering achievement of American literature.

• Moby-Dick
• Billy Budd

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Novelist · 1882 – 1941

James Joyce was an Irish novelist whose experimental masterpiece Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century, and whose innovations in language and stream of consciousness transformed modern literature.

• Ulysses
• Dubliners

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Writer · 1899 – 1986

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer whose brief, dazzling stories of labyrinths, infinite libraries and mirrored worlds made him one of the most influential figures in 20th-century literature and a master of modern short fiction.

• Ficciones
• The Library of Babel

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Writer · 1832 – 1898

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, an English writer and mathematician whose Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass revolutionized children's literature with their playful logic, nonsense and imagination.

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Through the Looking-Glass

Why Also a writer & poet · Comparable historical impact

Poet · 43 BC – 17

Ovid was a Roman poet of the Augustan age whose Metamorphoses, a sweeping collection of mythological tales, became one of the most influential works of classical literature on later Western art and poetry.

• Metamorphoses
• Ars Amatoria

Why Also a poet & writer · Active in the same era