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…
“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a Proverb is no Proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Philip James Bailey was born in Nottingham on 22 April 1816 and died there on 6 September 1902, after a long life in which one early work made him, for a time, one of the most discussed poets in the English-speaking world. His name is now chiefly attached to Festus, the immense dramatic poem first published in 1839, but Bailey’s career was more than the history of a single Victorian bestseller. It was the history of…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Joy, Wonder
