Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“It seemed my destiny to float along from the cradle to the grave on the happy stream of mediocrity.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness
Richard Barnefield, baptized on 29 June 1574 and buried in 1627, occupies a small but remarkably provocative place in the history of English Renaissance poetry. He was not among the most prolific writers of the Elizabethan age, nor did he sustain a public literary career over decades as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, or William Shakespeare did. Yet the poems he published during a brief period in the 1590s have continued…
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Elizabethan Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder
