Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints, “Va...-Vi...-”
for literature, language arts and social studies classrooms and home schoolers.

Paul Valery
b. 10-30-1871; Sete, France
d. 7-30-1945; Paris

Poet, essayist, philosopher and polymath, Paul Valery, is notable for his twenty years of not publishing any work (after the death of his mentor Stephane Mallarme) and then producing La Jeune Parque. He also made entries in a diary for every adult day of his life, and was the French culture representative to the League of Nations.

Paul Valery quote ~
• “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”
• “Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”

John Vanbrugh
b. 1-24-1664; London, England
d. 3-26-1726

Vanbrugh is noted as a dramatist for his two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) as well as an architect and designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard.

FYI - The Castle Howard was used as a location in the 1981 television dramatization of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

Mario Vargas Llosa
b. 3-28-1936; Arequipa, Peru

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

Maris Vargas Llosa quotes ~
• “If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.”
• “You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”
• “No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

Lope de Vega
b. 11-25-1562; Madrid, Spain
d. 8-27-1635, Madrid

Lope Felix de Vega y Carpio, one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature, was an important playwright and poet of the Spanish Golden Century Baroque literature, second only to Cervantes.

• Three Major Plays of Lope de Vega

Paul Verlaine
b. 3-30-1844; Metz, France
d. 1-8-1896; Paris

Poet Paul Verlaine is associated with the Symbolist movement and considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle (end of the century) in international and French poetry as a "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision.

He had a stormy affair with poet Arthur Rimbaud, finally dying of drug addiction, alcoholism and poverty. Both composers Gabriel Faure and Debussy set many of Verlaine's poems to music.

Paul Verlaine quotes ~
• “The poet is a madman lost in adventure.”
• “Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town.”

Jules Verne
b. 2-8-1828; Nantes, France
d. 3-24-1905; Amiens

Jules Verne, a pioneer in the science fiction genre, had many accurate anticipations of the future. One of his notable mis-steps was the geology of volcanoes in Journey to the Center of the Earth.

• Illustration from “Around the World in Eighty Days”
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

Jules Verne quote ~
• “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
• “In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle which it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York.”

Francois Villon
b. ca. 1431; probably Paris, France
d. ca. 1474

Francois Villon was a poet, thief and vagabond.

Francois Villon quote ~
• “My days are gone a-wandering. ”

• Villanelle - Poetry Forms posters
• Poems of Francois Villon: The Legacy, the Testament and Other Poems

The Poet Virgil
b. 10-15-70BC; present day Italy
d. ca. 19 BC

The Roman poet Virgil is best known for three major works — the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the Aeneid.

Virgil quotes ~
• “Each of us bears his own Hell.”
• “Every man makes a god of his own desire.”
• “Love conquers all.”
• “Your descendants shall gather your fruits.”

• Virgil Reading the 'Aeneid' to Livia, Octavia and Augustus by Ingres
• The Eclogues by Virgil : Dual Language Edition
• Aeneas & Dido print