In the autumn of 1871, as France was still reeling from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune, a child was born in the Mediterranean port town of Sète who would become one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary intellects. Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry entered the world on October 30th, in a region where the brilliant southern light seemed to sharpe…
“Books have the same enemies as man: fire, damp, beasts, time, and their own contents.”
Neighbourhood:
French Symbolists, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“My artistic object is gained if, in them, I have kept strictly within the lines assigned to the sculptor’s art.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
