Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…
“I am a man before I am a Frenchman, an Englishman or a Russian, and if there were opposition between the narrow interest of nationalism and the immense interest of the human race, I would say: Perish my nation, so long as humanity triumphs!”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sensuality
Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…
“Nor do I affect to doubt that the creation of the supreme emotion is a higher form of art than the reflection of the most exquisite sensation.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder