Extract from Elegy on Captain Cook is here.

Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

Anne struggled with her mental health for most of her adult life and began writing poetry as a means of therapy. Many of the themes she tackled in her often rawly autobiographical poems were seen as shocking by critics at the time. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside writers including Sylvia Plath, and her work was enormously successful. She won numerous honours and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and continues to be seen and studied as one of the greatest twentieth-century poets.

Her Kind is here.

Izumi Shikibu (born c. 976)

Izumi was one of the greatest women poets of the Heian period, during which there was an extraordinary flowering of art and literature at the Japanese Imperial Court. She enjoyed numerous love affairs – including dalliances with two sons of the Emperor Reizei – and was married twice. Her scandalous love affairs made such an impression, they were immortalized in stories written in the following century. Her legacy includes over two hundred poems, many of them very sexy, including a poetic diary of her relationship with Prince Atsumichi.

‘Out of the darkness’ is here.

Penelope Shuttle (born 1947)

Penelope has lived in Cornwall since 1970 and the county’s mercurial weather and rich history are continuing sources of inspiration. So too is the personal and artistic union Penelope shared with her husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, until his untimely death in 2003. She has written five acclaimed novels as well as seven poetry collections, her Selected Poems (1998) being a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize, and has won an Eric Gregory Award.

Poem is here.

May Sinclair (1863–1946)

May cut short her formal education to nurse her ill brothers, but educated herself through reading widely. She was one of Britain’s leading female writers and critics, producing stories, novels, reviews, and biographies of the Brontës, as well as poetry, although her reputation had dwindled until her novels were revived in the 1980s. She is credited with coining the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe modernist writing. May was fascinated by psychoanalysis and worked at a psychiatric clinic from 1913. She also served, briefly, with an ambulance unit in Belgium during the First World War. A staunch feminist, May was active in the Suffragette movement. Though she had once circulated in the highest literary circles – counting Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, H.D. and Charlotte Mew among her acquaintances – she suffered in later life from Parkinson’s disease and spent her last two decades in seclusion in Buckinghamshire.

The Chatelaine is here.

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)

Born into an upper-class Yorkshire family, Edith herself claimed that she was ‘more alive than most people’. She was a forceful and outspoken personality, often decked out in enormous jewellery and dressed like her heroine Elizabeth I, and her poetry was original and mould-breaking. She also wrote history and criticism, and some of her poems, including the famous Second World War poem ‘Still Falls the Rain’, were set to music. Her poetry recitals were always dramatic occasions – some recordings of them survive – and she toured America in the 1940s.