Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“By passing out into the non-human world, the life of trees and flowers and animals, man could get rid of his devouring egoism, his belittling self-aggrandisement, realise his true place in the universe, and be braced thereby and fortified.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…
“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
