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…
“Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others, this is the criterion of the goodness of a man.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Poet-Musicians, Political Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy
Fanny Greville, born Frances Macartney about 1724 and dead on 28 July 1789, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in eighteenth-century English poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a small number of poems, above all “A Prayer for Indifference,” rather than on a large published oeuvre or a public literary career of the sort enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Yet the very modesty of her exta…
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
