On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…
“For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow
Amelia Alderson Opie entered the world on a crisp November day in 1769, born into the bustling heart of Norwich, that ancient cathedral city pulsing with intellectual and radical energy. The only child of Dr. James Alderson, a respected physician known for his generosity to the poor and his progressive views, and his wife Amelia Briggs, she arrived on November 12, destined to weave her own vibrant thread into the tap…
“If writing were even an effort to me, I should not now be alive, but must have been absolument epuisée; and it might have been inserted in the bills of mortality—"dead of letter-writing, A. Opie.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
