20 books like The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

Sylvia Path (1932-1963) was only thirty when she committed suicide in London.

An American girl, alumna of Smith College, gifted and tortured from the start, she became most famous, after her death, for her novel The Bell Jar and Ariel, her posthumous book of lyrics that contains the much anthologized poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.”

She married the British poet Ted Hughes and bore two children. She and Hughes divorced. Much of her lived life is the material for her wrenching poems.

She was sanctified by the women’s movement, but she was no saint. Her legacy is her work.

And Heather Clark’s massive biography is a marvel of research, energy, sympathy, and literary analysis.

Keats, beloved of English majors and ordinary readers everywhere, died at 25.

No other writer – not Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, George Eliot, Jane Austen – would be remembered today if he or she had died at that age.

W.J. Bate was a magisterial Harvard scholar. His two sympathetic biographies, of Keats, and of Samuel Johnson, both won Pulitzer prizes and are still readable and important. They breathe life into their subjects and deeply humanize them.

You will weep with sympathy and understanding.

Every English major in the 20th century (maybe even in the 21st!) came to grips with T.S. Eliot. 

People remember J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And The Waste Land has just passed its 100th birthday and readers are still scratching their heads over it.

T. S. Eliot was the man—along with several others—who made modern poetry “hard” and complicated, and he was quite a complicated figure himself.

Lyndall Gordon gives us Eliot in all his complexities and shows how he became our age’s Dr. Johnson.

James Merrill (1926-1995) was a son of Charles Merrill, the man famous for bringing Wall Street to Main Street (Merrill Lynch. et al.).

He grew up in luxury—Manhattan, Long Island, Palm Beach— went to Amherst college, and was a poet born and bred.

A gay man at a time when it was still dangerous to be out, he wrote many superb, deeply moving lyric poems of “love and loss,” and an entire epic poem based on seances around a ouija board, which is still turning heads and bewildering readers.

Merrill’s own life and loves were as rich and varied as anything he produced in his work. Hammer spent 12 years on this book, and it is both long and utterly gripping.

This is a sparklingly funny play. I love its contemporary freshness, its fleetness of foot, and its irreverence. It satirizes the fashion for all things French among London’s social climbers. It sugars the pill of all that satire by bringing a fast-paced plot to a comic ending of marriage and reconciliation. It taught me that writers in seventeenth-century England like the play’s author, John Dryden, were importing words and ideas from France as they sought to trace a middle way between a servile mimicry of French culture and an insular rejection of it. 

In the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the mark of a true poet was to see things—to describe the visible and invisible worlds so vividly that everyone could see them too. 

Most modern readers are blind to this. But Jean Hagstrum teaches us how to see with eighteenth-century eyes. The pictures that poets make, and the paintings that inspire those visions, come alive in thoughtful readings that focus on the workshops of art: the schools where artists learn the craft of making what is imagined into something that seems real.

Again, here is a fantastic cast of characters: the bold Mrs. B, the swearing Fox terrier, Decius, and the unassuming protagonist, Janice. Quiet, kind, thorough, outwardly unremarkable, Janice is a cleaner. She is also a wonderful listener. What a joy it is when, with a little help from her friends, she finally unlocks her own story and transforms her life.

Here’s the moment when Janice grasps how much hope can be found in stories: "She looks around at the shelves of books, every one of which she has handled, and she begins to think there may be a way. A way of finding that hope. She is, after all, a collector of stories and a storyteller. Maybe she could tell her story as she has told other stories?"

This book is like a plump pie filled with seasonal treats, one delicious slice for every month of the year.

Rooted in Somerset, England, Maudsley skilfully presents folklore, beliefs, and happenings that pay homage to Britain and Ireland's nature, rural culture, and changing seasons. He carefully includes folk customs and stories from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

However, this book's natural juice and joy lie in Maudsley's knowledge of rural traditions and stories he shares in his work with Common Ground, an environmental and community organisation based in England. There are rhymes, songs, and food & drink recipes, all intricately woven into each month, season, and local harvest.

Everyone interested in living harmoniously with the natural world will enjoy this celebratory description of calendar customs and living traditions.

I fell in love with the three-year-old Cristabel Seagrove from the first page. I laughed with her, cried with her, and spent many years with her as she navigated her way into adulthood in the company of her equally engaging siblings.

The characters who inhabit their Dorset stately home before and during the Second World War are both engaging and infuriating. It’s an absolute gem of a book. 

I recommend Lost Memoirs for finally giving us a love story from an author we all have enjoyed since 5th grade. A true artist in “putting us in her life,” Syrie James accomplishes this while giving us readers the feeling of friendship with Jane Austen within these pages of her lost memoirs...

This book is of the recently found letters and diaries of Jane Austen of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility fame in not only books, but movies made over the years. It begins with the Austen Family Tree, which revealed that Jane had not only her sister, Cassandra, but six brothers, all either clergymen or military men with titles and at least a modicum of wealth. This was quite enlightening to me, who has read her forever, but somehow I’d missed this important aspect of her life, which gives her insights into the minds of men, better… show more.