C.K. Stead: Quick Facts

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Oct. 13, 2026

Facts

Also Known As	Christian Karlson Stead
Born	October 17, 1932 (age 94) • Auckland • New Zealand
Title / Office	poet laureate (2015-2017)
Notable Works	“All Visitors Ashore” • “Between” • “Crossing the Bar” • “Mansfield” • “Paris” • “Quesada: Poems 1972-1974” • “Risk” • “Sister Hollywood” • “Smith’s Dream” • “Straw into Gold: Poems New and Selected” • “Talking About O’Dwyer” • “The Black River” • “The Death of the Body” • “The End of the Century at the End of the World” • “The Necessary Angel” • “The Red Tram” • “The Right Thing” • “The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007-2012” • “Villa Vittoria” • “Voices” • “Whether the Will Is Free: Poems 1954-62”

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Robert Graves

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Keri Hulme

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D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence

English writer

Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott

Scottish writer

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis

Irish-born author and scholar

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

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Wole Soyinka, 2015

Wole Soyinka

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Cesare Pavese

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Portrait of Gilbert Keith Chesterton wearing glasses and a suit, with a mustache and tousled hair, looking directly at the camera.

G.K. Chesterton

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Simms, detail of an engraving published by Johnson, Fry and Company, 1861

William Gilmore Simms

American novelist

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Sir Stephen Spender

English poet

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Riccardo Bacchelli

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F.R. Leavis

British critic

Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, lithograph by François Le Villain after a portrait by Fabian Sarnecki.

Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz

Polish writer

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Horace Smith

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Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, portrait after an oil painting by I.E. Repin, 1879

Aleksey Konstantinovich, Count Tolstoy

Russian writer

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John Wain

British critic and writer

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A. Alvarez

British author and critic

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Andrew Lang

British scholar

Charlotte Lennox, detail of an engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi after a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Charlotte Lennox

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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:

Poetry: First Lines

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul

Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry

A Study of Poetry