David Hartley Coleridge was born on 19 September 1796 at Clevedon, Somerset, into one of the most celebrated, unsettled, and intellectually charged families of the English Romantic age. He was the eldest surviving child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, philosopher, critic, and author of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Sara Fricker Coleridge. His first name, David, honored the eighteenth-century philosopher Da…
“If the search were promoted by pure love, and conducted with honest simplicity, you would not judge harshly, tho’ for any length of time even to the end of life, it stray’d in error.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…
“Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse was poor.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow