Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a celebrated American poet, chiefly known for his controversial and highly original poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Born in 1819 on Long Island, he worked as a journalist, teacher, government clerk, and volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Whitman published his seminal work in 1855 with his own money, soon becoming one of the world's most popular and influential poets. After suffering a stroke in 1873 he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he died nineteen years later - just two months after the final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared on sale.

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but maintained many correspondences and read widely.

Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of her poems, which she had assembled herself.

William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the most influential thinkers and artists of his time. At Oxford, with the painter Burne-Jones, he fell under the influence of Ruskin and Rossetti.

Preoccupied with the poverty of modern design he taught himself at least thirteen crafts and founded his own design firm, Morris & Co.

In the late 1870s he became active in political and environmentalist matters and converted to socialism in 1883, helping to found the Socialist League a year later.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) was an English playwright and poet, who through his establishment of blank verse as a medium for drama did much to free the Elizabethan theatre from the constraints of the medieval and Tudor dramatic tradition.

His first play Tamburlaine the Great, was performed that same year, probably by the Admiral's Men with Edward Alleyn in the lead. With its swaggering power-hungry title character and gorgeous verse the play proved to be enormously popular; Marlowe quickly wrote a second part, which may have been produced later that year. Marlowe's most famous play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, based on the medieval German legend of the scholar who sold his soul to the devil, was probably written and produced by 1590, although it was not published until 1604. Historically the play is important for utilizing the soliloquy as an aid to character analysis and development.

The Jew of Malta (c. 1590) has another unscrupulous aspiring character at its centre in the Machiavellian Barabas. Edward II (c. 1592), which may have influenced Shakespeare's Richard II, was highly innovatory in its treatment of a historical character and formed an important break with the more simplistic chronicle plays that had preceded it.

Marlowe also wrote two lesser plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage (date unknown) and The Massacre at Paris (1593), based on contemporary events in France. Marlowe was killed in a London tavern in May 1593. Although Marlowe's writing career lasted for only six years, his four major plays make him easily the most important predecessor of Shakespeare.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied law but preferred writing and in 1881 was inspired by his stepson to write Treasure Island.

Other famous adventure stories followed including Kidnapped, as well as the famous collection of poems for children, A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson is buried on the island of Samoa.

Christina Rossetti was one of the Victorian age's finest poets. She was the author of numerous books of poetry, including Goblin Market and other Poems (1862), The Prince's Progress (1866), A Pageant (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1882).

Rossetti's poetry - characterized by intense feeling and symbolism - and has never disappeared from view and has much to say today's generation.,

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803-April 27, 1882) was a famous lecturer, philosopher, poet, and writer. He led the transcendentalist movement of the 1800s, mentored Henry David Thoreau, and was a pioneer of multiculturalism in American writing.

John Keats (1795-1821) was one of the most important poets of the Romantic period.

A doctor by training before, he was the author of some of the most widely-loved poems in the English language, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes."

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of America's greatest and best-loved writers.

Known as the father of the detective story, Poe is perhaps most famous for his short stories particularly his shrewd mysteries and chilling, often grotesque tales of horror he was also an extremely accomplished poet and a tough literary critic.

Poe's life was not far removed from the drama of his fiction. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by a foster family. As a young man, he developed problems with gambling, debts, and alcohol, and was even dismissed from the army.

His love life was marked by tragedy and heartbreak. Despite these difficulties, Poe produced many works now considered essential to the American literary canon.

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1564. The date of his birth is unknown but is celebrated on 23 April, which happens to be St George's Day, and the day in 1616 on which Shakespeare died.

Aged eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. They had three children. Around 1585 William joined an acting troupe on tour in Stratford from London, and thereafter spent much of his life in the capital. By 1595 he had written five of his history plays, six comedies and his first tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. In all, he wrote thirty-seven plays and much poetry, and earned enormous fame in his own lifetime in prelude to his immortality.

A political firebrand and an unorthodox thinker during his lifetime, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was the author of a large body of poetical works that left a deep mark in his own and later generations of writers.

One of the great figures of the Romantic age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 1834) is known both for his poetry and prose, and for producing Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth, a work which revolutionized English poetry.

Plagued by debts and laudanum addiction, he left many pieces unfinished, yet his extraordinary influence was felt in literary figures as diverse as Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thomas Moore is the author of the New York Times bestselling Care of the Soul and 19 other books on cultivating a deeper, soulful life. He was a monk for 12 years, a musician, a university professor and a psychotherapist. Today, he lectures widely on holistic medicine, spirituality, psychotherapy and the arts.

Oprah Winfrey referred to him as one of the top elders of the spirituality movement in our time. He has been awarded numerous honours, including the Humanitarian Award from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

Three of his books (The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Dark Nights of the Soul and Writing in the Sand) have won the prestigious Books for a Better Life award. He is a patron of Re-Vision, a London centre of spirituality and counselling, and is on the board of Turning Point, a bereavement counsellors training programme in Dublin, Ireland. He writes regular columns for Resurgence, Spirituality & Health and The Huffington Post.