12 June 1824: Lord Byron died on 19 April 1824 in Missolonghi, Greece. Two months later, Sir Walter Scott writes about the great poet: “We feel almost as if the great luminary of heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky.”
9 July 1888: The gift of writing precious nonsense as that which came from the pen of the late Edward Lear is denied to most authors.
27 April 1915: Editorial: The death of Rupert Brooke leaves us with a miserable sense of waste and futility, yet it is impossible to withhold even the most precious personalities.
7 April 1941: The eating habits of Percy Shelley are revealed. He had no time for food, abstaining from meat and alcohol and existing mainly on bread, according to an 1858 biography.
2 September 1952: The monumental five-volume Poets of the English Language, edited by WH Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, is the first systematic anthology from the mid-twentieth century viewpoint.
20 May 1965: Now that T.S. Eliot is dead, Time magazine, at least, is prepared to call Philip Larkin England’s greatest living poet. Here Larkin confesses in an interview that he can live a week without poetry but not a day without jazz.
29 August 1970: An interview with Leonard Cohen, who talks about his music and poetry just before an appearance at the Isle of Wight festival.
19 March 1989: A taste of forbidden fruit. Kate Kellaway looks at four new collections by women poets.
4 May 2002: Linton Kwesi Johnson - poet on the front line. His verse linked his Jamaican roots with British radical politics, and an original form he created - dub poetry - has influenced a generation of writers.
8 March 2007: Ruth Padel’s top 10 women poets.
27 October 2012: Sylvia Plath - On what would have been the poet’s 80th birthday, we look back through the archives at reviews of her work.
