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 wish to provide against the series of poems which I have associated with the art of sculpture being judged from an erroneous point of view.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812 at Southampton Cottage, Camberwell, then a semi-rural district south of London, and died on 12 December 1889 in Venice. Few English poets have combined such audacity of intellect, dramatic energy, moral curiosity, and technical resourcefulness. During his lifetime he moved from the position of a puzzling, frequently mocked young writer to that of a revered elder of Victorian let…
“When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant, God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder
