Lascelles Abercrombie (1881 - 1938) was an English poet and critic. Born in Ashton-on-Mersey (near Manchester, England), he was the son of a stockbroker. He was educated at Malvern College and Victoria University, Manchester, and became professor of English at Leeds in 1922. He became professor of English at London University in 1929 and Reader in English at Oxford University in 1935. He was the founding member of the group known as The Dymock Poets when he moved to the village to live near his sister. He published several volumes of Georgian-style poetry, collected as The Poems of Lascelles Abercrombie.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886 - 1961) was an American Imagist poet. Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter of a professor of Astronomy. She was educated at Gordon School and the Friend's Central School in Philadelphia and at Bryn Mawr College (1904-06). She lived in London from 1911 and married Richard Aldington in 1913. Following their divorce in 1938 (the two were separated for many years before their divorce), she settled near Lake Geneva. Her many volumes of poetry include Sea Garden (1916) , The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Flowering of the Rod (1946) and Helen in Egypt (1961). She also wrote several novels, including Palimpsest (1926), Hedylus (1928), the autobiographical Bid Me to Live (1960) and Tribute to Freud (1965).

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 - 1965) was an American poet and critic. He was born in St Louis, Missouri, the youngest child of Charlotte Stearns Eliot and Henry Ware Eliot, a southern businessman from a distinguished Bostonian family. Eliot's paternal grandfather, Walter Greenleaf Eliot, was a prominent Unitarian minister whose example greatly influenced Eliot's childhood and career. In 1906 Eliot entered Harvard University, completing his BA in 1909 and his MA in 1911. He began work in a doctoral thesis in 1912, which was eventually published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Eliot seemed set on an academic career - in 1912 he was appointed as an assistant in philosophy at Harvard. But whilst he was a student Eliot encountered Symon's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which he later described as a 'revelation'. Eliot's Harvard career was interrupted by a 'romantic year' in Paris (1910-11), during which he attended Bergson's lectures on personality at the Sorbonne, amongst other things. He returned to Europe again in 1914 as a travelling fellow in philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. It was in London in 1914 that he met another emigre American poet, Ezra Pound. On reading Eliot's The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Pound proclaimed that Eliot had 'modernised himself on his own', and he promoted Eliot to a starring role in the modern movement in literature, arranged for the publication of Prufrock (1915), and acted as agent and editor for Eliot's work. This role culminated in Pound's decisive editorial contribution to The Waste Land (1922). In 1915, after a two month courtship, Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood - a marriage that was to prove extremely unhappy, but which nevertheless contributed to Eliot's decision to continue living in England. After a period spent teaching (1917), working in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd's Bank in London, giving evening lectures (1916) and reviewing for philosophical journals (under the aegis of Bertrand Russell), Eliot's literary career finally got under way. Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1917, Poems in 1919 and Ara Vos Prec in 1920. As assistant editor of The Egoist (1917-19) Eliot was also beginning to play an influential role as a critic. However, in 1921 the strains of personal, professional and literary responsibilities took their toll on Eliot and he applied for leave from the bank. He suffered a mental and physical breakdown and went to Lausanne to recuperate. It was in these months that he wrote much of what was later to become The Waste Land. This was published in the first issue of The Criterion, a cultural quarterly journal which Eliot founded and Lady Rothermere sponsored. Eliot edited it until 1939. Through commentaries in The Criterion, his decisive role as an editor at Faber and Faber (which he joined in 1925) and his contributions to other literary periodicals, Eliot soon became probably the most influential literary critic of the 20th century. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948, and finding personal happiness (albeit belatedly) following his marriage to Valerie Fletcher in 1957, Eliot's post-WW2 role was that of an elder statesman and man of letters. He died on January 4, 1965 and his remains were buried at East Coker, the English village from where his family had emigrated in the 17th century.

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) was an American lyric poet - 'the voice of New England'. He was born in San Francisco, the son of a New England father and a Scottish mother. He studied at Harvard but failed to graduate. He worked as a teacher, cobbler and a New Hampshire farmer before moving to Britain (1912). It was in Britain, through the encouragement of Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Gibson that he published A Boy's Will in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914, which gained him an international reputation. He returned to the USA in glory in 1915, becoming Professor of English at Amherst in 1916. He continued to write poetry that was essentially New England in background, situation and character. In 1924, 1931 and 1937 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1950 he received a US senate citation of honour. He was Professor of Poetry at Harvard from 1939-43 before returning to Amherst in 1949 until his death in 1963.

Herbert Howells (1892 - 1983) was an English composer born in Lydney, Gloucestershire. At the Royal College of Music he studied under Charles Stanford. Before becoming professor of composition in 1920 at the Royal College of Music, he was for a short time a sub-organist at Salisbury Cathedral. In 1936 he became director of music at St Paul's Girl's School. In 1952 he became Professor of Music at London University and although he retired in 1962, he continued teaching there until he was well into his 80s. He is best known for his choral works. He was a friend of both Ivor Gurney and F W Harvey. He would go for long walks with Gurney when the two were in their teens and twenties, often disappearing for three days and nights at a time. He set some of Harvey's poems to music.

Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) was an American poet and critic, born in Hailey, Idaho. He was brought up in Wyncote, near Philadelphia and graduated from Pennsylvania University in 1906. He became an instructor at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, but after only four months he left for Europe where he travelled widely in Italy, Spain and Provence. His first collection of poems A Lume Spento (With Tapers Quenched) was published in 1908 in Venice. He was a poet of the Imagist school at the outset of his career and an experimenter. He was a co-editor of Blast (1914-15), the magazine of the short-lived 'Vorticist' movement, and London editor of the Chicago Little Review (1917-19). In 1920 he became Paris correspondent for The Dial, before making his home in Italy in 1924. He became involved with Fascist ideas, stirring up so much resentment over his antidemocracy broadcasts in the early part of WW2 that he was escorted back to the USA in 1945, and indicted for treason. The trial did not proceed as he was adjudged insane and placed in an asylum. In 1958 he was certified sane, released and he returned to Italy. T S Eliot regarded him as the motivating force behind 'modern poetry' and the poet who created a climate in which English and American poets could understand and appreciate each other. Pound's Cantos are probably his best-known poems, appearing in 1917. He edited Eliot's The Waste Land. Pound died in Venice in 1972.

Henry Williamson (1895 - 1977) is perhaps best known as the author of Tarka the Otter (which won the 1927 Hawthornden Prize). Born in Bedfordshire, he became a journalist following the First World War, but later turned to farming in Norfolk. He eventually settled in an Exmoor cottage, writing several semi-autobiographical novels. These included the long series A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight which features the hero, Phillip Maddison and several of which deal with his FWW experiences. His other FWW novel is Patriot's Progress (1930 reissued 1999). He also wrote two autobiographical works The Wet Flanders Plain (1929) and A Clear Water Stream (1958).

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