Poets of the Week: Cambridge’s 5 most famous poet alumni

1. William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Probably impossible not to include one of the founders of English Romanticism and the author of The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years. Brought up in the Lake District, the second of five children, he received an education in classics, literature, and mathematics.

He attended St. John’s College in 1787, where he was famously put off by the academic rigour and instead devoted his time to, for instance, going on walking tours through revolutionary France.

Wordsworth’s later partnership with Coleridge turned the former’s poetic style away from longer poems to focus on social protest, tragedy, lyric and the dramatic. He was aware that such compositions broke conventions and could quite possibly be dismissed by contemporary fashionable reviewers. He wrote in the ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ that ‘a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind’ and associated these forces with increased urbanisation and a move away from the simplicity of nature.

Image credit: Jess Marais 

2. Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Also regarded as one of the greatest English poets and a leading figure of the Romantic movement, whose most well-known works are ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.’ He spent three years at Trinity College before commencing a series of love affairs, including with his half-sister, Augusta. Finally, in 1816 he left England for Geneva, where he befriended Percy Shelley and continued to write about his travels. A year before his death, he spent 4,000 pounds on refitting the Greek naval fleet and commanded a unit of Greek fighters against the Ottoman Empire.

Byron was known for his flamboyance: he owned a pet bear as a student at Cambridge in order to mock a rule banning the ownership of dogs, and suggested it be considered for a fellowship. He also seems to have been the first ‘celebrity’, with a following known as Byromania and fan mail from anonymous admirers.

3. Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)

Born in Sialkot, Punjab, to a Kashmiri Muslim family, Iqbal was noted for his poetry in the Urdu language and is commonly referred to as ‘Allama’ (Persian for ‘most learned’). During the time he taught Arabic at the Oriental College in Lahore, he wrote poems including ‘Parinde ki faryad’ (‘A Bird’s Prayer’), a meditation on the freedom for animals and a children’s poem:

āzādiyāñ kahāñ vo ab apne ghoñsle kī
apnī ḳhushī se aanā apnī ḳhushī se jaanā
lagtī hai choT dil par aatā hai yaad jis dam
shabnam ke āñ.suoñ par kaliyoñ kā muskurānā

Gone are the freedoms of our own nests
Where we could come and go at our own pleasure
My heart aches the moment I think
Of the buds’ smile at the dew’s tears

Iqbal completed a second B.A. at Trinity College, Cambridge, before devoting his work to focus on the spiritual direction and development of society, including the role of Islam as a source for socio-political liberation and the need to eradicate political divisions between Muslim groups. He found time to write more philosophical poetry in the 1910s-20s, such as his ‘Asrar-i Khudi’ (‘Secrets of the Self’) and his ‘Rumuz-i Bekhudi’ (‘The Mysteries of Selflessness’). In these collections, he explored the relationship of Islam’s values with the individual desire for freedom and development.

Image credit: Sophie Carlin

4. Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)

Born in Ilford, Essex, Raine came from a family of poets on her mother’s side, whilst from her father, she inherited a love of Shakespeare and the etymological and literary aspects of poetry. Having read Natural Sciences at Girton College, she was inspired to examine the intersection of science and mysticism, as well as elements of neo-Platonism and Jungian psychology.

Raine returned to Girton as a research fellow from 1955 – 1961, during which time she published her critical studies of William Blake. Her poetry, from her first collection ‘Stone and Flower’ to ‘Living in Time’ and ‘The Pythoness’, is a search for the integration of faith and love, and often her speakers are involved in all workings of the universe, from creation to destruction:

From my blind womb all kingdoms come,
And from my grave seven sleepers prophesy.
No babe unborn but wakens to my dream,
No lover but at last entombed in me shall lie.

I am that feared and longer-for burning place
Where man and phoenix are consumed away,
And from my low polluted bed arise
New sons, new suns, new skies.

Image credit: Vedika Mandapati

5. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Last but by no means least, the great American poet who was known for her writing of ‘confessional poetry’, as well as her novel ‘The Bell Jar’. Her ‘Collected Poems’ were published in 1981, for which she was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Even by the time she took her life at the age of 30, she had amassed an admiring literary following, which only grew after her death, with many of her writings now on A-level syllabuses across the country.

Her poems are well-known to have explored her own mental anguish and troubled marriage to Ted Hughes, as well as conflicts with her parents and her own self-representation. She is often admired for the candidness in her writings, dispensing with a need for appearance and in doing so also highlighting some of the tensions in American society at the time. Appropriately, I will let some of her poetry do the talking:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

That’s all for this week’s poetry feature! If you’re a student at the University of Cambridge, we would love to see more of your poems in our Poem of the Week feature, so please keep sending them in to [email protected]. We look forward to receiving them!

Feature image credits: Bilyana Tomova

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