In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of friends – writers, artists, and intellectuals – formed what would later prove to be one of the most artistically and intellectually innovative groups of the period; they have since been given the name the Barranquilla Group, after the northern Co
Ben Jonson may be the most famous person to use the shortened version of his given name professionally. It is for hackneyed notes and anecdotes like these that the playwright, poet, and actor is now primarily known.
Evidently, it is really difficult to be a dramatist and poet if you lived
Alexander Pope now seems, like John Donne, one of the more modern – that is to say, imprecisely: human – of 18th-century poets: his writings are inflected with the stuff of his life, his preoccupations and surroundings, physical and intellectual; his life as he lived and considered it is evident
However accurate Andrew Marvell's association with the metaphysical poets, it is unfortunate that the singular writer – so singularly spiteful, winning, allusive, sardonic – should share a limited codified space with anyone else, even if his spacemates include such luminaries as John Donne, Georg