George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in the small town of Motihari in the Bengal Presidency of British India, emerged as one of the twentieth century’s most piercing literary voices. Though often remembered first as a novelist and essayist whose works dissected totalitarianism, social injustice, and the hypocrisies of power, Orwell began his writing life with poetry. Those early verses, lyrical yet…
“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Neighbourhood:
Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Longing, Sorrow
Ford Madox Hueffer, who later became Ford Madox Ford, was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, then a semi-rural district on the edge of London, and died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. He was one of the most energetic and consequential literary figures of the transition from late Victorian culture to modernism: a novelist, poet, memoirist, critic, editor, propagandist, literary theorist, and tireless ad…
“The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing that is open to your native genius—the only thing as to which you can say: I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness