Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in the parish of Alloway, near Ayr, in southwestern Scotland, and died in Dumfries on 21 July 1796. In the relatively brief span of thirty-seven years, he became Scotland’s best-loved poet, a major maker and remaker of song, an incisive satirist, and an emblem of democratic fellow feeling. His reputation has sometimes obscured the complicated human being beneath it. Burns was…
“The following trifles are the production of a simple, untutored Muse, with which I amused myself.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Poet-Musicians, Political Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“A clerk in the Secretary's Office told me ‘it was all about my book’.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
