April is National Poetry Month! In honor of the occasion, here is a list of famous poets (courtesy of FamousHomeschoolers.net) who were homeschooled or self-educated as children, either out of necessity or for various other reasons.
Mercy Warren
American Revolution Eyewitness
Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) was an American poet, playwright, and activist during the era of the American Revolution. Like most girls at the time, Warren had no formal education; she made extensive use of her uncle’s large book collection to educate herself. She took a particular interest in history, politics, and poetry. Warren compiled 18 poems and two plays in a book entitled Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, which was her first work to be published under her own name. Most of her works were political satire and dealt with themes of liberty and virtue. In 1805, she published a three-volume comprehensive history of the American Revolution, considered to be her magnum opus.
Phillis Wheatley
African-American Poet
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) received an education in the Wheatley household while also working for the family. The Wheatleys were a progressive family and did not see anything immoral in educating a slave. They taught Phillis to read and write, and even encouraged her to write poetry. She was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry. Her book titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. Phillis Wheatley’s Christian upbringing played a key role in her success as a writer. By using religion as the main force in her poetry she was able to build a bridge between herself, an African slave, and her white audience. Phillis’ work was strongly influenced by the promise of life after death, which made her poetry stand out. Twenty of her fifty five surviving poems are elegies written to comfort relatives with eternal life in heaven. Wheatley also wrote about current political events such as the Stamp Act and was a supporter of American independence. She wrote a poem “To His Excellency, George Washington,” in which she praises him for his heroism.
Robert Burns
Scottish Poet and Lyricist
Robert Burns (1759-1796) is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is most famous for the New Year’s Eve celebratory lyrics of Auld Lang Syne. As a child, he was given irregular schooling and much of his education came from his father, a self-educated tenant farmer. The elder Burns taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief. Robert was also taught and tutored by the young teacher John Murdoch, who opened an “adventure school” in 1763 and taught Latin, French, and mathematics to both Robert and his younger brother Gilbert from 1765 to 1768. After a few years of home education, Burns was sent to school in mid-1772 before returning to full-time farm labor until 1773, when he was sent to lodge with Murdoch for three weeks to study grammar, French, and Latin. In the summer of 1775, he was sent to finish his education with a tutor. The first poems he wrote were love poems, starting with “O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass.”
Robert Browning
English Poet
Robert Browning (1812-1889) grew up in a home with over 6,000 books, many of them rare, as his father was a literary collector. After attending one or two private schools and showing a dislike of school life, he was educated at home by a tutor using the resources of his father’s library. Browning wrote poems and plays during the Victorian period. His most famous works are The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a children’s poem and The Ring and the Book, a 12-book long poem. He was married to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Walt Whitman
American Poet
One of the great American poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) self-published his poetry collection titled Leaves of Grass. It is now a milestone in American literature, and he is credited with inventing “free verse,” a whole new poetic form. He was also a journalist and editor, and was mostly self-taught since he was 11 years old.
Sharlot Hall
Arizona Historian, Poet and Writer
Sharlot Hall (1870-1943) was a largely self-educated and highly literate child of the Arizona frontier. She was the first woman to hold an office in the Arizona Territorial government. She wrote two books of poetry, Cactus and Pine: Songs of the Southwest and Poems of a Ranch Woman. She founded the Prescott Historical Society and opened a museum to house her collection of artifacts related to Arizona pioneers and pre-historic Yavapai county.
Amy Lowell
Modernist Poet
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was born into a prominent New England family—her brother, Percival Lowell, was a well-known astronomer, while another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, became president of Harvard College. However, school was a source of considerable despair for the young Amy Lowell as she was a social outcast. So she was privately tutored by a governess in between sojourns to Europe with her family and, at the age of 17, began a diligent process of educating herself inside the family’s seven thousand-volume library. Though lacking a formal education, she was drawn to poetry and became known for her role in the Imagist movement, which emphasized clarity, precision, and free verse. She published her first collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, in 1912. She was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Robert Frost
American Poet
Robert Frost (1874-1963) was one of America’s most beloved 20th century poets, well known even in his own lifetime. Frost was a nervous child who did not take well to public school (he only lasted for one day in kindergarten!), so he was educated at home. After his father died, Robert moved with his mother and sister to Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his grandparents, and Frost attended Lawrence High School. From an early age, Robert liked playing with words and the art of language. Frost was a resolutely anti-modern poet, unlike his contemporaries. He preferred the traditional structural constraints of rhyme, meter, and regimented stanzas over free verse. His famous poems include The Road Not Taken, Mending Wall, and Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening. Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and he was named Poet Laureate of Vermont. Frost was the U.S. Library of Congress’s Poetry Consultant from 1958 to 1959, a position that was renamed Poet Laureate in 1986.
Carl Sandburg
American Poet
Carl Sandberg (1878-1967), the renowned American poet, was a lifelong learner whose insatiable curiosity and dedication to knowledge left an indelible mark on the world of literature. From a young age, Sandburg displayed a voracious appetite for books and a remarkable ability for absorbing information. His early education was modest, but he supplemented it by spending countless hours in the public library, immersing himself in a wide range of subjects. This self-driven pursuit of knowledge laid the foundation for his future accomplishments. At the age of thirteen, he left school and went to work driving a milk wagon and various other jobs. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later, he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children’s literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He won three Pulitzer Prizes — two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He was “a major figure in contemporary literature.” His works include Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, and Smoke and Steel.
Gabriela Mistral
Nobel Prize-winning Latin American Poet
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in Vicuña, Chile, was a renowned poet, educator, and diplomat. She became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, recognized for her deeply emotional and lyrical poetry. Her works often explored themes of love, sorrow, nature, and Latin American identity, blending Native American and European influences. Mistral’s early life was marked by hardship, including the loss of her father and financial struggles. The scarcity of trained teachers, especially in rural areas, led to her older sister, Emelina, being responsible for much of the poet’s early education. Although her own formal education ended at age 11, Gabriela advocated for educational reform and access to schools for all social classes.
