In the verdant countryside of Victorian England, on January 9, 1881, a voice was born that would become one of the most distinctive—and contentious—in early twentieth-century British poetry. Lascelles Abercrombie arrived into a world still enchanted by Tennyson's melodies and Browning's dramatic monologues, yet he would live to witness the seismic upheavals of modernism, two world wars, and the transformation of poet…
“There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
William Watson was born on 2 August 1858 at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire, and died on 11 August 1935 at Ditchling, Sussex. During his lifetime he occupied a curious and at times conspicuous place in English literary culture. He was praised as one of the finest inheritors of the Victorian poetic tradition, repeatedly mentioned as a possible Poet Laureate, admired for his disciplined music and moral seriousness, and…
“The masters of literature are universal explorers and adventurers; they do not deliberately beat about for ever in a little creek or inlet, and call that navigating the world.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair