William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“Cats — by day the most docile of God's creatures, every one of them in the night enlisting under the devil's banner — took the place by storm after the human voice had ceased.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
John Clare was born on 13 July 1793 in Helpston, a village then in Northamptonshire and now associated with Cambridgeshire, and died on 20 May 1864 in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He came to be called the “peasant poet,” a phrase that helped sell his first books but also diminished him by making his social origins seem more important than his imagination. Clare was indeed the son of agricultural labourers, a m…
“I found the poems in the fields and only wrote them down.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Spirituality
