George Crabbe was born on 24 December 1754 in Aldeburgh, a small Suffolk fishing port on the North Sea coast, and died on 3 February 1832 at Trowbridge in Wiltshire. He lived through a period of extraordinary literary and political change: the later eighteenth century’s polished, rule-conscious verse gave way to Romanticism’s exaltation of imagination, nature, and individual feeling; the French Revolution altered Eur…
“A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Spirituality
John Clare was born on 13 July 1793 in Helpston, a village then in Northamptonshire and now associated with Cambridgeshire, and died on 20 May 1864 in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He came to be called the “peasant poet,” a phrase that helped sell his first books but also diminished him by making his social origins seem more important than his imagination. Clare was indeed the son of agricultural labourers, a m…
“I long to be what I was when I was a boy.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Spirituality
