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…
“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
James Thomson, born about 11 September 1700 at Ednam in Roxburghshire and dead on 27 August 1748 at Richmond in Surrey, was among the most consequential poets of eighteenth-century Britain. A Scottish writer who made his career in London, he achieved a rare combination of popularity, literary innovation, and long afterlife. His great poem, The Seasons, led English readers away from the tightly controlled urban wit an…
“It is declaring against the most charming power of imagination, the most exalting force of thought, the most affecting touch of sentiment.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Spirituality
