Robert Southey was born in Bristol on 12 August 1774 and died at Greta Hall, near Keswick in the Lake District, on 21 March 1843. During his lifetime he was among the most visible men of letters in Britain: a poet, historian, biographer, reviewer, editor, translator, political commentator, children’s writer, and, from 1813 until his death, Poet Laureate. Yet posterity has treated him unevenly. He is often remembered…
“The will and the power to produce anything great are not often found together.”
Neighbourhood:
Hymn Writers, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Wonder
Joseph Blanco White was born José María Blanco y Crespo on the 11th of July, 1775, in a house on a street corner in the old Jewish quarter of Seville, not far from the city's great cathedral. He would die sixty-five years later, in May 1841, in Liverpool, a city about as different from sun-bleached Andalusia as nineteenth-century Europe could offer, and the distance between those two places, geographic and spiritual,…
“I now rejoice at the approach of Sunday. This very morning while at Chapel, I had the strongest and deepest conviction that I had never witnessed anything so really sublime as the whole worship in which I was joining. In a word, the whole service is a reality.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Spirituality
