Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known by his pseudonym of Pietro Metastasio, was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti.
Count Pietro Verri was an economist, historian, philosopher and writer. Among the most important personalities of the 18th-century Italian culture, he is considered among the fathers of the Lombard reformist Enlightenment and the most important pre-Smithian authority on cheapness and plenty.
Charles-Antoine-Guillaume Pigault de l'Espinoy, better known as Pigault-Lebrun, was a French novelist, playwright, and Epicurean. Victor Hugo references Pigault-Lebrun in chapter I part 8 of Les Misérables, describing a senator as "probably a product of Pigault-le Brun."
Pilar Adón is a Spanish writer and translator. She is the author of the novels De bestias y aves, Las efímeras, and Las hijas de Sara; the short story collections La vida sumergida, El mes más cruel, and Viajes inocentes; the short novel Eterno amor; and the poetry collections Da dolor, Las órdenes, Mente animal, and La hija del cazador. Among the awards she has received are the Critical Eye Award (2005), the Madrid Bookstores Award for Best Book of Poems (2018), the Cálamo Award (2023), the Francisco Umbral Award for Book of the Year (2023), the Spanish Critics' Award for Best Book in Spanish (2023), and the National Literature Prize for Narrative (2023).
Pinchas Polonsky is a rabbi, Russian-Israeli Jewish-religious philosopher, researcher, and educator active among the Russian-speaking Jewish community. Rabbi Polonsky has written original books and a number of translations of works on Judaism.
Pindar was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable." His poems can also, however, seem difficult and even peculiar. The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis once remarked that they "are already reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning". Some scholars in the modern age also found his poetry perplexing, at least until the 1896 discovery of some poems by his rival Bacchylides; comparisons of their work showed that many of Pindar's idiosyncrasies are typical of archaic genres rather than of only the poet himself. His poetry, while admired by critics, still challenges the casual reader and his work is largely unread among the general public.
