Poets

What lands on a date

• 01-04 T. S. Eliot · Died in London, Nobel laureate and central modernist poet. source
• 01-22 Lord Byron · Born in London; his satirical verse made him a celebrity. source
• 01-28 W. B. Yeats · Died at Roquebrune, France; buried later in County Sligo. source
• 01-29 Robert Frost · Died in Boston, four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. source
• 02-11 Sylvia Plath · Died in London by suicide; Ariel appeared posthumously. source
• 02-23 John Keats · Died of tuberculosis in Rome, aged twenty-five. source
• 03-05 Anna Akhmatova · Died near Moscow after decades of censorship and personal loss. source
• 03-20 Ovid · Roman poet born at Sulmo, east of Rome. source
• 03-26 Walt Whitman · Died in Camden, New Jersey, after declining health. source
• 03-26 Robert Frost · Born in San Francisco; later identified with rural New England. source
• 04-04 Maya Angelou · Born Marguerite Johnson in Saint Louis, Missouri. source
• 04-07 William Wordsworth · Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. source
• 04-13 Seamus Heaney · Born on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland. source
• 04-19 Lord Byron · Died at Missolonghi, Greece, while supporting the independence struggle. source
• 04-23 William Wordsworth · Died at Rydal Mount; Poet Laureate since 1843. source
• 05-15 Emily Dickinson · Died in Amherst; most of her poems were published posthumously. source
• 05-28 Maya Angelou · Died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, aged eighty-six. source
• 05-31 Walt Whitman · Born in West Hills, Long Island, New York. source
• 06-05 Federico García Lorca · Born in Fuente Vaqueros near Granada, Andalusia. source
• 06-13 W. B. Yeats · Born in Sandymount, Dublin, to an artistic family. source
• 06-23 Anna Akhmatova · Born near Odessa; a leading voice of Russian Acmeism. source
• 07-08 Percy Bysshe Shelley · Drowned when his boat sank in a storm off the Italian coast. source
• 07-12 Pablo Neruda · Born Neftalí Reyes in Parral, Chile. source
• 07-19 Petrarch · Died at Arquà near Padua, a day before his seventieth birthday. source
• 07-20 Petrarch · Italian humanist and poet born in Arezzo, Tuscany. source
• 07-25 Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Died in Highgate, London, after years of ill health. source
• 08-04 Percy Bysshe Shelley · Born at Field Place, Sussex, into a landed family. source
• 08-12 William Blake · Died in London while still singing, according to witnesses. source
• 08-19 Federico García Lorca · Executed by Nationalist forces near Granada during the Spanish Civil War. source
• 08-30 Seamus Heaney · Died in Dublin, Nobel laureate and translator of Beowulf. source
• 09-14 Dante Alighieri · Died in Ravenna, completing the Divine Comedy shortly before. source
• 09-21 Virgil · Died at Brundisium after returning from Greece with Augustus. source
• 09-23 Pablo Neruda · Died in Santiago days after the 1973 coup in Chile. source
• 09-26 T. S. Eliot · Born in Saint Louis, Missouri; later a British citizen. source
• 10-15 Virgil · Roman poet born near Mantua; the Aeneid became a national epic. source
• 10-21 Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, England. source
• 10-25 Geoffrey Chaucer · Died in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey. source
• 10-27 Sylvia Plath · Born in Boston, Massachusetts, to academic parents. source
• 10-31 John Keats · Born in Moorgate, London, to a livery stable keeper. source
• 11-08 John Milton · Died in London, blind, having completed Paradise Lost. source

+ 5 more day-precise entries in the corpus.

The year rail

Some lives are known by year, not by day. Those entries are kept on a rail — never placed on a fabricated date.

• Ovid 17
• Dante Alighieri 1265
• Geoffrey Chaucer 1343
• Divine Comedy 1320
• Paradise Lost 1667
• Leaves of Grass 1855
• The Waste Land 1922