Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…
“How the world is managed, and why it was created, I cannot tell; but it is no featherbed for the repose of sluggards.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Ralph Hodgson was born on 9 September 1871 in Darlington, County Durham, and died on 3 November 1962 in Minerva, Ohio. His life traversed an astonishing stretch of history: the late Victorian industrial world, the upheaval of two world wars, the flowering and fragmentation of literary modernism, and the gradual emergence of a more public consciousness about animals and the natural environment. Yet his poetry seems to…
“Did anyone ever have a boring dream?”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Joy
