Ebenezer Elliott was born on 17 March 1781 at Masbrough, near Rotherham, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and died on 1 December 1849 at Great Houghton, near Barnsley. He became known in his own lifetime as the “Corn Law Rhymer,” a title at once admiring, limiting, and revealing. It identified him with the campaign against the laws that kept imported grain expensive and bread beyond the reach of many poor families, b…
“I claim to be a pioneer of the greatest, the most beneficial, the only crimeless Revolution, which man has yet seen. I also claim to be the poet of that Revolution—the Bard of Free-trade.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Anger, Sorrow, Fear
William Allingham was born on 19 March 1824 in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, a small market town at the mouth of the River Erne, and died on 18 November 1889 at Hampstead in London. His literary reputation rests above all on a handful of extraordinarily durable lyrics: poems of rivers, birds, childhood, fairy lore, village life, and remembered Irish landscapes. Yet his career was broader and more complicated than the…
“Does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men’s work?”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Fear
