Richard Tottel, born around 1528 or 1530 in the bustling cathedral city of Exeter in Devon, emerged from modest provincial roots to become one of the most transformative figures in the history of English literature. Though his primary trade was the printing of law books—volumes that shaped the legal minds of Tudor England—his name endures as the visionary behind *Songes and Sonettes*, better known today as *Tottel’s…
“How unperfect the books of the laws of England were before, what price the scarceness had raised, the most part marvelously mangled, and no small part no where to be gotten.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20 November 1752 and died in London on 24 August 1770, not yet eighteen years old. Few English poets have left behind a life so brief, so fiercely productive, and so persistently mythologized. His name has become almost inseparable from the image of the neglected young genius: a boy of provincial poverty who invented a medieval poetic world, attempted to conquer the London lit…
“When an author resolves to think himself in the right, it is more than human argument can do to convince him he is in the wrong.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Folk & Ballad Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder
