Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, near Paris, France, and died on 16 July 1953, eleven days before his eighty-third birthday. He was one of the most conspicuous, gifted, and divisive English-language writers of the first half of the twentieth century: a poet, essayist, historian, travel writer, novelist, political campaigner, Catholic apologist, journalist, and public…
“The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a good cigar, and a glass of wine.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“If I failed to teach, I gathered out of my failure some instruction for myself, which he never managed to do.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
