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
Amastan Ag Mohamed, conventionally dated c. 1803–1878 in modern retellings, occupies an unusual and revealing place in the imaginative history of Saharan literature. He is not a historically documented nineteenth-century Tuareg poet in the ordinary biographical sense. Rather, he is a fictional figure created to give a personal face to the cultural world from which traditional Tuareg desert poetry emerges. The name, t…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow