Entry 1 Famous British poets and writers

Contents

1. 
   Entry
   

1.1 Famous British poets and writers……..

2. 
   Main part
   

2.1. Dylan Thomas and his biography……….

2.2 Life and works of Dylan Thomas …….

2.3 Dylan Thomas’s poems…………………..
Conclusion………………………………………………………….
List of used literature………………………………………….


I. Entry
1.1 Famous British poets and writers
Poets from English speaking nations such as Great Britain and the United States have penned some of the finest pieces of literature. Britain in particular, has produced many such great minds who have expressed many of their thoughts through hymns and poems. These poets have incorporated different aspects of daily life such as nature, romance, and the various problems plaguing the society in their work. Some of the famous poets from Britain are Robert Adamson, Mark Akenside, William Cowper and Richard Arlington. William Cowper alone has penned around 89 poems, such as ‘Abuse of the Gospel’, ‘Exhortation to Prayer’, ‘For the Poor’, and ‘God Moves in a Mysterious Way’. The poems penned by Richard Arlington, such as ‘At The British Museum’, ‘Bombardment’, ‘Childhood’ and ‘Daisy’ created a great impression amongst readers which were inspired by the poet’s daily life. Rudyard Kipling, who is well known for his well-acclaimed story ‘Jungle Book’, has also written a dozen poems such as the ‘Disciples’, ‘The Ballad of East and West’, as well as ‘Gunga Din’. Here’s we bring you the collection of biographies of a few famous poets from Britain. Try to gather everything about their life stories, timelines and few interesting facts & trivia related to them.
What do Dylan Thomas, Charles Wright and W. B. Yeats have in common? The answer is that they were all world famous poets whose poems are still studied as a part of literature. Poets have often been described as people who step outside the bounds of the obvious and produce aesthetic and, in some cases, even rhythmic works that are meant to take the reader on a fanciful journey through the poet’s words. Poems have been a part of literature forever and it is believed that the earliest poems evolved from folk songs. A poem usually has certain characters that define it, some of which are things like the rhyme scheme, symbolism, rhetoric, rhythm and even irony. This form of literature has also been used to tell stories, the best example of which the two poems Iliad and The Odyssey, written by Homer, are the best examples. Having familiarized ourselves with poems, it’s only natural that we move onto better acquainting ourselves with the people who wrote them. To that end, what follows now is a collection of the biographies of some of the most famous poets. They include their timelines, information about their professional and personal lives along with interesting facts and trivia about them.
The famous British writer Joanne K. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter books. When she was a small girl,she lived in Winterbourne. It is a large village in the south of England. It is not far from the city of Bristol. She went to St Michael's Primary school until she was nine years old. Potter's surname originated from some of her friends in the village.
Since the year Harry Potter was introduced to the world, he has become one of the most popular characters in the history of literature. He is adored by everyone : children, adults and even some elderly people.This orphaned boy has to live with his unpleasant relatives, because he's lost his parents.
He attends the Hogwarts School where they teach him different magical tricks. In fact, it's a place where he studies wizardry. There are seven books about the boy. Harry Potter fights the evil Voldemort, who was responsible for the death of his parents. All books were pictured on the screen and the films are as interesting as books. In fact, Harry has two best friends as stated in the story. Their names are Hermione and Ron. Here are the list of books about Harry Potter:

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  The Philosopher's Stone (1997)
  
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  The Chamber of Secrets (1998)
  
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  The Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
  
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  The Goblet of Fire (2000)
  
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  The Order of the Phoenix (2003)
  
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  The Half-Blood Prince (2005)
  
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  The Deathly Hallows (2007)
  

Alan Milne was born in London on the 18th of January in 1882. His father was the headmaster of a small preparatory school. One of the teachers at the school was the famous writer H. G. Wells.

Milne went to Westminster School at the age of 11 and then went on to Cambridge to become a mathematician. Then he went to London hoping to earn his living as a writer. At the age of 24 he was given a post of assistant editor of the famous magazine "Punch".
In 1913 he married Dorothy De Selincourt and the following year when the war broke out he joined the Army. The Milnes' only child was born on August 21st 1920. They called their son Christopher Robin. The Milnes bought him a teddy bear for his first birthday. The teddy bear was soon name Winnie, after a real-life bear that lived in London Zoo. A. A. Milne wrote a lot of poems for Christopher Robin and about him.

In eleven days he wrote so many children's poems that they filled a book. It was published in 1924 under name "When We Were Very Young" and sold half a million copies. In 1925 the Milnes bought a farm in Sussex, which they used for weekends away from London. From his old house it was a short walk over a bridge into the Ashdown Forest where Christopher Robin and his teddy, now known by the name of "Winnie-the-Pooh" or "Pooh Bear", used to play. Each daily adventure in the Forest gave A. A. Milne more material for his now famous book "Winnie-the-Pooh" published in 1926.

In this cartoon we can see again the favourite characters and the places where they live: Christopher Robin, Winnie, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo, Rabbit, Owl.After the book "Winnie-the-Pooh" A. A. Milne wrote another book of children's verses – "Now We Are Six" and "The House at Pooh Corner".
What happened to Winnie-the-Pooh?
Well, the bear was put into the glass case in the museum with all the other toy animals.
After Milne's death in 1956, his widow sold her rights to the Pooh characters to the Walt Disney Company, which has made many Pooh cartoon movies.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The boy was often ill and during the cold winters stayed in the house. He had no brothers or sisters. Books were his only friends. Robert read very much. He read about other countries and drew maps of different places which he wanted to see. The boy wrote stories of adventures on the sea and told those stories to his parents.

In summer when Robert was not ill, he travelled with his father over Scotland. He saw storms on the sea and described those storms in his stories. At school he began to write stories and poems and wanted to be a writer, but his father was an engineer and wanted his son to be an engineer too. He said that writing poems and stories was only a hobby, not a profession.

Stevenson went to the Edinburgh university for some time, then he travelled in different countries and wrote many stories. In 1883 Stevenson published his book "Treasure Island". Readers liked the book very much. In 1886 Stevenson published his book "Kidnapped". Then other books of adventures came out. People in many countries read and still read Stevenson's stories. The hobby of a small boy was now his profession. But the writer was sick and he died in 1894.

J.R.R. Tolkien, an English novelist and scholar, won fame due to his original epic trilogy "The Lord of the Rings". This outstanding work, that by the mid-1960s became a sociocultural phenomenon, consists of "The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers", and "The Return of the King".

J.R.R. Tolkien was educated at Oxford and participated in World War I. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and of English language and literature (1945-59) at the University of Oxford.
Tolkien began writing his trilogy as an undergraduate.

While working on it, he created "The Hobbit", of 1937, which was an introduction to it. Both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" are set in a mythical past; the latter work chronicles the struggle between various good and evil kingdoms for possession of a magical ring that can shift the balance of power in the world.

The trilogy is remarkable for its fantasy types - elves, dwarves, hobbits - and its sustained imaginative storytelling. It is regarded as a rare, successful modern version of the heroic epic. A prequel of "The Lord of the Rings", "The Silmarillion", was published in 1977. "Unfinished Tales" was published in 1980. An animated film version of the first two books of the trilogy appeared in 1978. The film version of "The Lord of the Rings" came out in the year 2002. Its success was tremendous.
Rudyard Kipling is one of the outstanding British writers. He was born in 1865 in the family of an Englishman in India. He got his education in England but returned to India in 1882. There he spent 6 years working in colonial English press. There he published his first literary works. In 1890 he published his first novel "The Light that Failed", which brought him fame. He was one of the most popular writers of his time. During his life he visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
His novel "Kim" was written under the impressions of the War. In October 1902 his "Just so Stories for Little Children" were published. His fairy-tales from the book were rather unusual for the British literature of that period. One can find the influence of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" in Kipling's work. But this influence didn't prevent Kipling from creating absolutely new, unusual fairy-tales. The unusual effect of his tales is reached by the rhythm and the music of words. Those who were lucky to listen to Kipling reading his fairy-tales noted that they always sounded truthful. Besides, not only children but even adults were very fond of "Just so Stories". Together with "The Jungle Book" it still enjoys great popularity. Every year the children in "Kipling Society" write continuation to his fairy-tales. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles L. Dodgson, the man who wrote a famous book for children "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Charles L. Dodgson was born in England in 1832. He got his early education at a public school. Then he became a student at Oxford. Charles studied mathematics and later taught this subject in the same college.

Charles Dodgson had no family, but he loved children very much. He often visited his friend, who had a large family. There were three little girls in the family. One of them Alice, was four years old. Dodgson liked Alice very much and he often told her interesting stories which he made up himself. Charles told Alice Liddell about the adventure of a little girl, and she liked the stories very much.

When Alice Liddell was about ten years old, she asked Charles to write down the stories for her, and he did so. He called the heroine of his book also Alice. This hand-written book had many pictures made by Charles himself. They were not very good pictures but the children liked them.

One day a friend of the Liddells, a writer, came to see the family. He saw the hand-written book made by Charles Dodgson and began to read it with a great interest. He read the book to the end and said that it was good and that all the children in England must read it. Charles decided to publish the book but he did not want to do it under his own name. So he took the pen-name of Lewis Carroll. The book came out in 1865 and all the people who read it liked it very much. Later the book was published in the United States, in France and in Germany. The first Russian translation of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" came out in 1923.

The son of a London butcher, and educated at a Dissenters' academy, he was typical of the new kind of man reaching prominence in England in the 18th century — self-reliant, industrious, possessing a strong notion of responsibility. Defoe's first important publication was An Essay upon Projects (1698), but it was not until the poem The True-born Englishman (1701), that he received any real fame. An ill-timed satire, The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), an ironic defense of High Church against nonconformists, resulted in Defoe's being imprisoned. He was rescued by Robert Harley and later served the statesman as a political agent. He turned to writing novels when he was over fifty..

Defoe has been called the father of modern journalism; during his lifetime he was associated with 26 periodicals. From 1704 to 1713 he published and wrote a Review, a journal concerned with the affairs of Europe. He was nearly sixty when he turned to writing novels. In 1719 he published his famous Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The main hero spent 28 years on the island. Robinson Crusoe describes the daily life of a man marooned on a desert island. Although there are exciting episodes in the novel, its main interest lies in the way in which Crusoe overcomes the extraordinary difficulties of life on the island. Defoe's great novels were not published under his name but as authentic memoirs. His major works include Captain Singleton (1720), Colonel Jack (1722), Roxana (1724), and A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727).
Defoe's writing is always straightforward and vivid, with an astonishing concern for circumstantial detail.

William Shakespeare was one of the greatest and famous writers in human history. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon, a small town in the middle of England, in 1564. His father wanted his son to be a well-educated person and William was sent to the local grammar school.

Studying at school the boy actually did not have any free time. But he spent his rare spare hours walking in the forest or watching the river Avon.
Those days there were not a lot of theatres in towns and actors and actresses had to travel moving from one place to another with their shows. Sometimes they visited Stratford-on-Avon. William liked to watch them playing. He got fond of their profession and he decided to become an actor.

He went to London and there he became an actor. At that time he began to write plays too. Shakespeare was at the same time an actor and a playwright. In his works he reflected events of his contemporaries' life. His plays were staged in many theatres, translated into many foreign languages. That made Shakespeare a very popular man.Most famous of his plays are Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. They are still popular and you can watch his .plays in almost any country of the world. He produced thirty seven plays at all. He had connections with the best English theatres for about 25 years.

William Shakespeare wrote also a lot of poetry including his unbeaten sonnets. There are numerous songs written with his poems. He is still most often published author of the world and well known among people. We do not know much about his life. We can only guess what kind of man he was analyzing the legends and a few documents of the time.

Shakespeare died in 1616, but millions people today still admire his plays.