Gerald Massey, born on 29 May 1828 in Tring, Hertfordshire, and dead on 29 October 1907 in South Norwood, London, lived one of the most striking self-made literary lives of the Victorian age. He was a poet, lecturer, editor, radical reformer, Shakespearean commentator, spiritual seeker, and amateur investigator of comparative religion. In each of these roles he carried the imprint of his beginnings: he had known chil…
“Above all, Poverty is a cold place to write Poetry in. It is not attractive to poetical influences. The Muses do not like entertainment which is not fit for man or beast.”
Neighbourhood:
Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Anger, Despair
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“Having been wholly taken up with my visiting my friends the brotherhood of poets in Paris, I have since my arrival not had a minute to write to you until the present.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
