Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 and died there on 31 August 1867, leaving a body of work comparatively small in quantity but seismic in effect. Few writers have altered the possibilities of lyric poetry so decisively. Baudelaire inherited the grandeur and rhetoric of French Romanticism, yet he redirected poetry away from nature, historical spectacle, and heroic confession toward the nervou…
“Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l’une vers Dieu, l’autre vers Satan.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street, Soho, London, into a city that was becoming the commercial, imperial, and intellectual center of Britain. He died seventy years later, on 12 August 1827, in a modest room south of the Thames, leaving behind work that had attracted only a small and sometimes bewildered audience during his lifetime. Yet Blake would eventually be recognized as one of the mos…
“Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Spirituality