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 have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…
“I flatter myself that I shall ere long be in the way of becoming a great man. For have I not headaches like Pope? vertigo like Swift? grey hairs like Homer?”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality
