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…
“For poetry, like science, has its final precision; and there are expressions of poetic knowledge which can no more be rewritten than could the elements of geometry.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
Sir Samuel Ferguson was born in Belfast on 10 March 1810, at a moment when Ireland’s political union with Great Britain was still recent and its cultural future was fiercely contested. He died in Howth, County Dublin, on 9 August 1886, having become one of the most distinctive Irish literary figures of the nineteenth century: poet, barrister, judge, antiquary, translator, public servant, and advocate for the serious…
“I was an Irishman before I was a Protestant.”
Neighbourhood:
Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sensuality
