Playwrights, Poets, and Songwriters

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote tragedies, Othello, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. He also wrote comedies, sonnets, and histories.
He was born on April 23, 1564.

Thomas Merton (1915-68), a Trappist monk and priest at Gethsemani Abbey, KY, wrote poetry, spiritual treatises, and a famous biography called The 7 Storey Mountain.

Aogan O'Rathaille/Egan O'Rahilly (1675-1729) wrote poems in Irish-Gaelic language. See An Duanaire/An Irish Anthology 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed edited by Sean O'Tuama and Thomas Kinsella. (1981: University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia).

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London.
In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.
He was a friend of T. T. Eliot.

James Whitcomb Riley (October 7, 1849-July 22, 1916), US poet of Irish ancestry.

Walt Whitman (1819-90) was born into a working class family in West Hills, New York, a village near Hempstead, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was inaugurated a s the first president of the newly formed United States. The poet's last words, a request to be moved in bed, "Shift, Warry" were addressed to Fritzinger. The poet died on March 26, 1892, his hand resting in that of Traubel. The cause of death was miliary tuberculosis, with other contributing factors. The autopsy revealed that one lung had completely collapsed and the other wa s working only at one-eighth capacity; his heart was "surrounded by a large number of small abscesses and about two and half quarts of water." Daniel Longaker, Whitman's physician in the final year, noted that the autopsy showed Whitman to be free of alcoholism or syphilis. He emphatically rejected the "slanderous accusations that debauchery and excesses of various kinds caused or contributed to his break-down. Walt Whitman was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born. Walter Whitman, Sr. (1785-), had been born just after the end of the American Revolution; always a liberal thinker, he knew and admired Thomas Paine. Walter Sr., after giving his first son Jesse (1818-1870) his own father's name, his second son his own name, his daughter Mary (1822-1899) the name of Walt's maternal great grandmothers, and his daughter Hannah (1823-1908) the name of his own mother, turned to the presidential heroes of the Revolution and the War of 1812 for the names of his other three sons: Andrew Jackson Whitman (1827-1863), George Washington Whitman (1829-1901), and Thomas Jefferson Whitman (1833-1890). Only the youngest son, Edward (1835-1902), who was mentally and physically handicapped, carried a name that tied him to neither the family's nor the country's history. Walter Whitman Sr. was of English stock, and he married in 1816 to Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch and Welsh stock.
He is most well known for the collection of poems called Leaves of Grass.
While nursing soldiers, Walt wrote Beat, Beat, Drums and other Civil War poems he published under the title, Drum Taps.
He wrote an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, called When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.
He also wrote:
I sing the Body Electric,
and Pioneers, O Pioneers.

-Ed Folsom, The University of Iowa.
-Kenneth M. Price, The College of William and Mary. See photos.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote poetry and helped Lady Gregory in the Gaelic Revival. They established the Abbey Theatre, where his plays on Irish folklore were presented.
The Death of Cuchulain 1939, a verse play published the year Yeats died, is one of these.

Irish Folklore.

Jeff Wayne wrote a Rock musical version of War of the Worlds.See also John Lennon,
Paul McCartney,
The Beatles,
Jim Morrison and see also The Doors
Boz Scaggs, etc.

Melissa Gray at NPR.org.