John Gillespie Magee Jr., born in Shanghai, China, on 9 June 1922 and killed over Lincolnshire, England, on 11 December 1941, occupies an unusual and enduring place in twentieth-century literature. He is remembered above all for “High Flight,” the fourteen-line poem that begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” and ends with one of the most quoted conclusions in English poetry: “Put out my hand, and tou…
“It is called High Flight and was inspired by a flight I made a few days ago.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Georgian Poets, Hymn Writers
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Spirituality
Charles Harding Firth was born in Sheffield on 16 March 1857, into a family whose prosperity, civic conscience, and intellectual ambitions helped to shape his future. His father, Mark Firth, was a prominent steel manufacturer, philanthropist, and public figure whose wealth was tied to the industrial transformation of nineteenth-century Sheffield. Yet the younger Firth’s enduring interests lay not in the furnaces and…
“The time has gone by when one man could sit down in his study and undertake to write a continuous history of England or France; and it will not come again in our days.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
