In the gentle folds of Dorset's Blackmore Vale, where the River Stour meanders through meadows fringed with ancient oaks and the air hums with the songs of larks and the lowing of cattle, a voice arose that would forever capture the heartbeat of rural England. William Barnes, born on February 22, 1801, at Rushay Farm in the hamlet of Bagber near Sturminster Newton, emerged from humble farming stock to become one of t…
“Anglo-Saxon has not been cultivated into a better form, but has been corrupted for the worse, since King Alfred's days.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Joy, Tenderness
On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…
“A vote, like a law, is no good unless there is an arm behind it; it cannot be enforced. This is a shameful truth, perhaps, but it is true.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow
