John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the first surviving child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings Keats. Though later admirers often imagined him as the archetypal fragile Romantic poet, set apart from ordinary life by genius and suffering, his origins were practical, urban, and socially modest. His father managed the Swan and Hoop livery stable at Moorgate, owned by Frances’s father, John Jennings. Ke…
“I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman—they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
James Henry Leigh Hunt, known throughout his literary life as Leigh Hunt, was born on 19 October 1784 at Southgate, then a village north of London, and died at Putney on 28 August 1859. He was a poet, essayist, journalist, editor, critic, translator, dramatist, and indefatigable friend to writers whose fame would eventually eclipse his own. To describe him merely as a minor Romantic poet is to miss the range of his a…
“Where the mouth is sweet and the eyes intelligent, there is always the look of beauty, with a right heart.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder
