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Some of our most revered poets also moonlighted their other skills. Who says poets aren’t exceptional?

William Carlos Williams: A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams was also a pediatrician. He is said to have delivered more than 2,000 babies.

Wallace Stevens: The pioneering American Modernist poet, another Pulitzer winner, was also an insurance executive who worked for years as vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co.

Geoffrey Chaucer: The author of “The Canterbury Tales,” one of the cornerstones of English lit, pushed paper as well as wrote on it. He served as a customs officer and accountant in 14th-century London.

Lord Byron: Among many other pursuits, Byron – a famous maverick and renaissance man – helped the Greeks mount a war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, until he fell ill and died. (Bonus points: His daughter, Ada, helped conceive the design for the first computer.)

There is beauty in randomness; it is art:

The Academy of American Poets has released this audio clip of Dylan Thomas’s reading of his own famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” It’s not an mp3 you can download, but you can listen to this beautiful villanelle in the flash player!

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Scholars have uncovered a new poem by Sappho:

You for the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts
be zealous, girls, and the clear melodious lyre:

but my once tender body old age now
has seized; my hair’s turned white instead of dark;

my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.

This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.

Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,

handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife.