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…
“The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to nothing but error and confusion.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 25 May 1803 and dead in Concord, Massachusetts, on 27 April 1882, became one of the defining voices of nineteenth-century American literature. He was at once a poet, essayist, lecturer, editor, religious dissenter, and public moralist, though no single title entirely contains him. His greatest influence lay in his ability to make philosophical inquiry sound urgen…
“The simplest words, — we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Peace