David Hartley Coleridge was born on 19 September 1796 at Clevedon, Somerset, into one of the most celebrated, unsettled, and intellectually charged families of the English Romantic age. He was the eldest surviving child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, philosopher, critic, and author of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Sara Fricker Coleridge. His first name, David, honored the eighteenth-century philosopher Da…
“One by one, my old friends drop away, and though I want not well-wishers, nor active benefactors, I feel painfully how few are left of those who were bound to me by nature, or a parent’s memory.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Robert Herrick was born in London on 24 August 1591 and died at Dean Prior in Devon on 15 October 1674. He is remembered as one of the supreme lyric poets of seventeenth-century England: a writer capable of making a four-line epigram feel as complete as a polished jewel, and of making flowers, ribbons, country festivals, kisses, bells, tears, and prayer seem charged with extraordinary significance. His poetry is ofte…
“The best of life is but intoxication, and the soberest men are the most deceived.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow