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
Francis James Child, born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 February 1825 and dead in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 11 September 1896, became one of the most consequential preservers of traditional verse in the English-speaking world. He was not a collector in the modern fieldworker’s sense: he did not chiefly travel from village to village with a notebook, recording singers’ performances and melodies as later folklorist…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
