Giacomo Leopardi was born in Recanati, in the Marches, then part of the Papal States, on 29 June 1798, and died in Naples on 14 June 1837, only weeks before his thirty-ninth birthday. His short life produced one of the most searching bodies of poetry and prose in modern European literature. He is often introduced as Italy’s supreme poet of pessimism, and there is truth in the description, but it is insufficient if it…
“Human beings are miserable by necessity, yet determined to believe they are miserable by accident.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
William Philpot was born on 16 April 1823 and died on 16 April 1889, completing a life of exactly sixty-six years. His career belongs to the enormous, uneven, and still incompletely recovered field of nineteenth-century poetry: the work of writers who published in small editions, contributed to local or denominational periodicals, read before societies, circulated manuscripts among friends, or gained recognition with…
“Business is a kind of material body without which the spiritual life is a kind of ghost. In the perfect life they are essential to each other.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
