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…
“Yet what more calm than death, and the reflections which death begets in a Christian Mind?”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…
“He was naturally very near the point of translation, and gave a vague impression that he did not require to be born again, but remained on earth for the benefit of American tourists.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Irony