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[German Version] (Jun 13, 1865, Sandymount, Ireland – Jan 28, 1939, Roquebrune, France), Irish poet, playwright, and mystic. Yeats was the son of a Protestant lawyer in Sligo. After attending the Metropolitan School of Art, in 1887 he joined the circle of the Decadents and the Yellow Book in London, where he was one of the founders of the Rhymers’ Club. Politically he championed the Celtic Revival; religiously he was sympathetic to theosophy and Rosicrucianism (Rosicrucians). In 1917 he married a …

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[German Version] Used as a technical term in the history of English literature, “metaphysical poets” refers to a specific category of Elizabethan and Jacobean lyricists between W. Shakespeare and J. Milton. The concept was introduced in the 18th century with a strong negative connotation. Given a positive turn (as propagated by Herbert John Clifford Grierson and T.S. Eliot at the beginning of the 20th cent.), the works of the poets whom Samuel Johnson had criticized may be classified according to …

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[German Version] (Mar 25, 1925, Savannah, GA – Aug 4, 1964, Atlanta, GA), American story-teller who dissects with cool irony and black humor the consumerist, psychologically impoverished society of the southern United States in the early years of the Cold War. Her often shrilly satirical short stories, collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), and her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), ensured a broad readership and admission to the academic canon. Her life was governed by unwavering Cathol…

[German Version] (Jul 3, 1683, Upham – Apr 5, 1765, Welwyn), English playwright and poet. He began as a jurist in Oxford; he met with little success as a poet and tragedian, but finally as an Anglican priest he found a position as royal chaplain. After the death of his wife, he wrote …

[German Version] (Aug 4, 1804, Salem, MA – May 19, 1864, Plymouth, NH), Romantic master of American fiction and classical interpreter of New England Puritanism (Puritans/Puritanism). One of his ancestors, a judge in the 18th-century Salem witchcraft trials and immortalized by Hawthorne in the patriarch of The House of the Seven Gables…

[German Version] (Jan 3, 1892, Bloemfontein, South Africa – Sep 2, 1973, Bournemouth, England), English philologist, poet, and novelist. Tolkien studied at Oxford, where he was appointed professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925 and professor of English language and literature in 1945. His first book was A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), his second Songs for the Philologist (1936). His essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1937) was much admired by his colleagues. In the same year he published The Hobbit, a children’s book, in which the loveable hobbit Bilbo Baggins sets…

[German Version] (baptized Apr 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, England – Apr 23, 1616, Stratford), poet and playwright, actor and director. Shakespeare entered the world as a thi…

[German Version] (Sep 20, 1886, Holloway, London – May 15, 1945, Oxford), British writer, critic, and theologian. Williams gave voice to his Christian faith and his reflections on good and evil and the relationship between human beings and God in a wide range of media: not only in meditative poetry but between 1936 and 1941 in a verse drama about T. Cranmer, the English archbishop of Canterbury, who was burned as a heretic in 1556, as well as covertly in studies of the traditional king Arthur poetry: …

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[German Version] (Oct 16, 1888, New York – Nov 27, 1953, Boston, MA) is considered the founder of serious American dramatic art; in 1936 he became the second American to receive the Nobel Prize. O’Neill had Irish Catholic parents of dubious social status. His father starred in melodrama on the commercial stage in the United States, and between 1883 and 1912 played the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo almost 4,000 times. His mother came from the affluent middle class. The fact that O’Neill was born in a shabby hotel and died in a hotel is indicative of a lif…

[German Version] (actually Thomas Lanier; Mar 26, 1911, Columbus, MS – Feb 24, 1983, New York), a pioneer of realistic tragic drama in the United ¶ States. Williams, the son of a travelling salesman, studied in Missouri, Iowa, and at Columbia University. He was working for a film studio in Hollywood when his family tragedy The Glass …

[German Version] (Apr 17, 1622, Llansaintffraed, Wales – Apr 23, 1695, Newton-by-Usk, Wales). In 1638 Henry Vaughan and his twin brother Thomas, a philosopher in the hermetic tradition, en…

[German Version] (c. 1552, London – Jan 16, 1599, London). For centuries Spenser, the son of a clothmaker, has been among the luminaries of English poetry. As a scholarship student at Cambridge, he became known through his friendship with the poet P. Sidney, to whom he dedicated his “Shepherd’s Cale…

[German Version] (Oct 28, 1903, London – Apr 10, 1966, Combe Florey, Somerset), a great prose stylist, was the son of a publisher; he began his literary career early, as editor of his school magazine. After studying in Oxford and London, he worked briefly as a schoolmaster until his satirical social novels ( …

[German Version] (1637[?], Hereford – Sep 27, 1674, Teddington), poet and mystic, closely related to the metaphysical poets. The son of a shoemaker, he was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1657 he became a parish priest in Credenhill; in 1667 he was appointed chaplain to Sir Orland Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, in whose house he spent his last years. His anti-Catholic polemic Roman Forgeries ¶ (1673) and his posthumously published treatise Christian Ethics (1675) found little response, but his vivid religious poetry – first discovered in manuscript …

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[German Version] 1. Amos Niven (Sep 18, 1895, Madison, WI – May 1, 1993, Cambridge, MA), New Testament scholar and poet. From 1916 to 1918, Wilder served as a volunteer in the Balkans and France. He studied at Oberlin College, Oxford, Harvard, and Yale, receiving his Ph.D. in 1933; he taught at the Andover Newton Theological Seminary (1933–1943), the University of Chicago (1943–1954), and Harvard (1954–1963). He emphasized the relationship of mythology and symbolism to the historical reality of the past and the cultural exper…

[German Version] 1. William (Apr 7, 1770, Cockermouth – Apr 23, 1850, Grasmere), leading English poet of the early Romantic period (Romanticism). He was the son of a lawyer representing a wealthy estate owner. Orphaned in 1783, the young poet was shaped more by his school years in Hawkshead and the natural beauty of life in the Lake District of northern England than by Cambridge and early industrial London. A walking tour through ¶ France during his last summer break, when the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille was being celebrated, turned the student at St. John’s College into a republican. After passing his examinations, he elected to settle in Orléans in order to learn French; there he fell in love with Annette Vallon. Financial difficulties, the September massacres of 1792, and premonitions of the reign of terror drove him to return to England after a year, where he was attracted to the radicalism of Wi…