William Shakespeare wrote these lines in his first sonnet:

FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory;
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thout that are now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Poet and novelist Jack Kerouac coined the term "Beat" in the late 1940s, but was not until the 1950s that it would become a slang term symbolizing a literary movement by writers such as Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. The "Beat" movement rejected the social constraints of the 1950s and reflected a growing disillusionment with the "establishment" and traditional American values. Representative works include Kerouac's novel On the Road, Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch, and poems by Ginsburg such as "Howl".

Ben Jonson was named the first poet laureate of England in 1616. The title, however, did not become an official royal office until 1668, when John Dryden assumed the honored post. Since that time, the office has been awarded for life. The poet laureate is responsible for composing poems for court and national occasions.

T. S. Eliot wrote these lines in "The Waste Land", arguably his most famous poem, which documents the journey of the human soul in its search for redemption.

Maxwell Anderson, one of the most important American playwrights of the early 20th century, wrote his plays in verse in an attempt to return tragic poetry to the American stage. He said that he was tired of "plays in prose that never lifted from the ground."

Although it is a mistaken belief that e. e. cummings changed his name officially to lowercase letters, he used capital letters in his verse very rarely and only to add meaning, and he did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name.

"The Raven", by Edgar Allan Poe, begins with the line: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary..."

The very first Nobel Prize in Literature (1901) was awarded to the French poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme, author of Stances et Poèmes (1865).

Archibald Lampman, born in Morpeth, Ontario, was NOT a Harlem Renaissance poet. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and James Weldon Johnson were all poets of the Harlem Renaissance, an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among African Americans in all fields of art which occurred in New York City between 1920 and 1930.

Although Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes all exceeded Aeschylus in certain aspects of dramatic construction, Aeschylus is almost universally considered the greatest of all ancient dramatists in terms of pure poetic value.