Maud Gonne did not marry William Butler Yeats, the poet who made the actress famous through his poems of unrequited love.
In 1903, after knowing Yeats for fourteen years, Gonne married Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary characterized by Yeats as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.”
MacBride was executed for his role in the Easter Rebellion against the British in 1916.
In 1917, Yeats gave up waiting for Gonne and married Georgie Hyde Lees.
Henry Fielding summoned poet laureate Colley Cibber to court in 1740 for the murder of the English language. Fielding issued the summons under the pseudonym “Captain Hercules Vinegar.”
Thomas Chatterton was the author of several pseudo fifteenth-century poems supposedly written by monk Thomas Rowley. He committed suicide in his London garret by taking arsenic at age seventeen, driven to despair by poverty. He became a hero of native English verse to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Chatterton was the author…
Author Marguerite Duras was born in Indochina, in 1914. The French writer is the author of the novel The Lover (1984) and the screenplay Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960).
Dr. Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to Satan is torn apart by devils at the end of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.
James Dickey has written two novels, Deliverance (1970) and Alnilam (1987). Dickey also wrote the screenplay for the 1972 movie Deliverance, and appeared in the film as a sheriff. A poet and critic, Dickey received the National Book Award for poetry in 1966 for Bucketdancer’s Choice (1965).
In Green Mansions (1904) by William H. Hudson, Rima the Bird Girl is able to understand the language spoken by the creatures who live in the South American forests.