Robert Frost is one of America's most beloved poets. Born in 1874 in San Francisco, California, he spent most of his life in rural New England.

His poems frequently drew on his rural surroundings to teach deeper principles on life. Some of his most famous poems include "Mending Wall," "Birches," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and "The Road Not Taken" featured in this book.

By his passing in 1963, Frost had been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, received the Congressional Gold Medal, and been nominated thirty-one times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a writer, art-collector, and advocate for the avant-garde. Born in Pennsylvania, she studied psychology at Harvard and attended medical school, dropping out in her fourth year to move to Paris with her brother Leo.

Here she played a crucial role in shaping the burgeoning European avant-garde, hosting literary salons that counted Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Ernest Hemingway among the visitors. She was the author of countless poems, plays and shorter works, as well as books including Three Lives, The Making of the Americans, Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - a memoir written in the voice of her life partner of many decades, Alice.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merton College, Oxford. His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctoral thesis was on F. H. Bradley.

He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. After teaching for a year or so he joined Lloyds Bank in the City of London in 1917, the year in which he published his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations.

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.