Sir Henry Taylor occupies one of the more curious niches in nineteenth-century English letters: a poet who spent his working life not in garrets or universities but behind the desk of a government office, quietly shaping the administration of Britain's colonies while writing, in his spare hours, verse dramas that made him, for a brief and dazzling season, one of the most celebrated writers in the land. He was born on…
“The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep; for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the world of greater importance.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Sorrow, Spirituality
Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“I write from memory alone; and of memory the principal fountain-head is, and must be, the association of ideas.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
Francis Hastings Doyle only
From the biographies
Sir Henry Taylor:
bishop middleham, county durham, george taylor, sir james stephen, philip van artevelde, isaac comnenus, edwin the fair, the virgin widow.
Francis Hastings Doyle:
victorian ideals, the private of the buffs, sir francis hastings doyle, barrister, oxford professor, balliol college, eton, the duke of monmouth.
