About the Book English poetry begins with Anglo-Saxon poetry such as the hymn on the creation, which Bede attributes to Cædmon (658–680AD). William Shakespeare was the stand out poet of the Elizabethan period, while Milton was considered the greatest poet of Jacobean and Caroline pe5riod (1603-1670). The Romantic movement was very big, proiducing such greats as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. The major Victorian poets were John Clare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins. James Macpherson was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation, while Robert Burns is regarded as the national poet of Scotland. The most important figure of Scottish Romanticism, Walter Scott, began as a poet. In Wales the works of the great hymn writers of the 18th and 19th centuries were the poets William Williams Pantycelyn and Ann Griffiths. In the early 20th century there was a Welsh renaissance, with poets like T. H. Parry-Williams and D. Gwenallt Jones and T. Gwynn Jones.
Charles Robert Ashbee (17 May 1863 – 23 May 1942) was an English architect and designer who was a prime mover of the Arts and Crafts movement, which took its craft ethic from the works of John Ruskin and its co-operative structure from the socialism of William Morris.
Ashbee was involved in book production and literary work. He set up the Essex House Press after Morris's Kelmscott Press closed in 1897.