Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, the Shelley family home near Horsham in Sussex, and died on 8 July 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia off the Italian coast before he had reached his thirtieth birthday. The extraordinary compression of his life has encouraged a legend of Shelley as the beautiful, doomed Romantic rebel: an ethereal poet, political prophet, atheist, lover, exile, and vict…
“They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812 at Southampton Cottage, Camberwell, then a semi-rural district south of London, and died on 12 December 1889 in Venice. Few English poets have combined such audacity of intellect, dramatic energy, moral curiosity, and technical resourcefulness. During his lifetime he moved from the position of a puzzling, frequently mocked young writer to that of a revered elder of Victorian let…
“I believe the fault comes from a too-sweet sense of the freedom of being true with you, telling you all, hiding nothing.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder
