Charles Tennyson Turner was born Charles Turner on 4 July 1808 at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire, and died on 25 April 1879 at Grasby, also in Lincolnshire. He lived during the long Victorian transformation of English literary culture, yet his own life retained a strongly local character: he was a country clergyman, a husband, a brother in an unusually gifted family, and a poet whose finest achievements were small…
“God has instilled into the human heart (at least since Sin entered into the world) a modest reticence about certain things without which poetry may be to a certain extent lovely, but Christianity is never prurient.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness
Alfred Austin was born on 30 May 1835 at Headingley, then a village just outside Leeds in Yorkshire, and died on 2 June 1913 at Ashford, Kent. For seventeen years, from 1896 until his death, he held the conspicuous and difficult office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Yet his name has endured less securely than those of the poets who preceded and surrounded him. To later readers, Austin has often appeared chie…
“The worst thing about a poet is that, when he gets a little drunk, he gets a little poetical.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness