Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“I have been represented as saying with Baudelaire, ‘Art for Art’, and laying myself open to all the unfavourable limitations which that dictum is unjustly supposed to imply.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Francis William Bourdillon, born on 22 March 1852 and dead on 13 January 1921, occupies an unusual position in English literary history. He is remembered by many readers, often without recognition of his name, for a single exquisite lyric: “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” Its opening contrast—“The night has a thousand eyes, / And the day but one”—has passed into common literary memory, quoted in anthologies, schoolro…
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness
