John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the first surviving child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings Keats. Though later admirers often imagined him as the archetypal fragile Romantic poet, set apart from ordinary life by genius and suffering, his origins were practical, urban, and socially modest. His father managed the Swan and Hoop livery stable at Moorgate, owned by Frances’s father, John Jennings. Ke…
“I am certain of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Walter John de la Mare was born on 25 April 1873 at Charlton, then in Kent and now part of southeast London, into a family whose circumstances were modest but whose cultural inheritance was unusually varied. His father, James Edward de la Mare, worked as an official at the Bank of England; his mother, Lucy Sophia Browning, came from a family with Scottish connections. The surname preserved a French Huguenot ancestry,…
“Only the rarest kind of best is good enough for the young.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness
