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Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, in 1869. Best known for his poem “For the Fallen,” written at the onset of World War I, Binyon also wrote and translated verse drama and worked as an art historian. He died in 1943.
Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.
Thomas Hardy, whose books include Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, was one of the most influential novelists and poets of England’s Victorian era. He died on January 11, 1928.
John Allan Wyeth, Jr., in 1894 in New York City. He published a single book of poetry, This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets (Harold Vinal, 1928), about his experience in World War I. Wyeth died in 1981 in New Jersey.
Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky) was born in Rome on August 26, 1880.
Winifred M. Letts was a novelist, playwright, and poet who famously wrote about her experiences during World War I. Her collections include More Songs from Leinster (John Murray, 1926), and The Spires of Oxford and Other Poems (E. P. Dutton and Company, 1918). She died in 1972.
Born in 1892, Archibald MacLeish was a poet, critic, and playwright who fought in World War I. MacLeish was awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times, and he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1946 to 1949. He died in 1982.