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…
“Art is good—is an incalculable gain to man; but art, in itself equally perfect, which grows with humanity and can assist humanity in growing—is still better.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in progress, confidence in religious doctrine, confidence in moral formulas, and confidence that elevated poe…
“A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean something. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
