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…
“An art in which I have as yet failed to perceive either morality or immorality.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Mark Alexander Boyd was a man of restless fire and Renaissance contradictions—a Scottish poet, soldier of fortune, scholar, and wanderer whose life unfolded like one of the vivid, wind-tossed leaves in his most famous poem. Born into the turbulent world of late sixteenth-century Scotland and Europe, he lived only thirty-eight or thirty-nine years, yet crammed into that brief span the adventures of a dozen men. He fou…
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Renaissance Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Despair, Sorrow
