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…
“A vote, like a law, is no good unless there is an arm behind it; it cannot be enforced. This is a shameful truth, perhaps, but it is true.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow
Richard Realf stands as one of the most enigmatic and poignant figures in nineteenth-century American poetry—a man whose extraordinary talents were matched only by the turbulence of his existence. Born on June 14, 1832, in the quiet village of Framfield in East Sussex, England, and dying by his own hand on October 28, 1878, in Oakland, California, Realf's forty-six years traced an arc of brilliance and despair, ideal…
“I have erred greatly in my life, and suffered greatly, but I have always been a servant and never a hireling of the truth.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing
