The English poet and radio producer Terence Rogers Tiller was born in Truro, Cornwall, on 9 September 1916. His early career was in medieval history at the University of Cambridge. During the World War II he taught in Cairo, and then in 1946 he joined the BBC. In 1955 he was producer of the first BBC radio adaptation of The lord of the rings. He later brought work by Mervyn Peake to the airwaves. Other BBC projects led to his translations of Piers Plowman and Dante, and the Chess Treasury of the Air (1966) for Penguin, which he edited. As a poet, he was published by Hogarth Press: Poems (1941) and The inward animal (1943). Notes for a myth (1968) and That singing mesh, and other poems (1979) were published by Chatto and Windus in the Phoenix Living Poets series. He also edited New Poems (1960) with Anthony Cronin and Jon Silkin.

Terence Rogers Tiller died on 24 December 1987.

Tiller had also translated A season in hell by Arthur Rimbaud, and Four of a kind by Paul Verlaine.

The French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, Ardennes, on 20 October 1854. He produced his works while still in his late teens, Victor Hugo describing him at the time as 'an infant Shakespeare', and he had given up creative writing altogether before the age of 20. As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music, and arts, and prefigured surrealism. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, traveling extensively on three continents before his death.

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud died from cancer just a few days after his 37th birthday on 10 November 1891.

Paul-Marie Verlaine, born in Metz on 30 March 1844, was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siecle in international and French poetry. He died in Paris on 8 January 1896.