Robert Seymour Bridges was born on 23 October 1844 at Walmer, near Deal in Kent, into a prosperous and cultivated English family whose security gave him both educational opportunity and, eventually, the independence to pursue literature without needing to earn his living from it. He was the fourth son of John Thomas Bridges and Harriet Elizabeth Bridges. His father had served in the navy and later held administrative…
“There is a point in art where these two ways merge and unite, but in apprenticehood they are opposite approaches.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Peace
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“If I am not immortal as a poet, I shall be immortal as the greatest literary fraud of the twentieth century.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing