William Sharp was born on 12 September 1855 in Paisley, Renfrewshire, at a time when Scotland’s industrial towns were expanding rapidly but remained surrounded, in memory and imagination, by older rural worlds. He would become one of the most energetic and versatile literary figures of the late Victorian period: a poet, critic, biographer, editor, translator, anthologist, travel writer, and cultural interpreter. Yet…
“To betray publicly the private life and constrained ideal of that inward self for a reward's sake would be a poor collapse.”
Neighbourhood:
Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Scottish Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Joy, Peace
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…
“Truly, I think that a little ‘Art for Art’ has already done a great deal of good in England, and that a little more is needed, and would be equally beneficial.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
