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…
“No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…
“I am not a poet, and I never wanted to be a poet.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
