Jessie Pope was born on 18 March 1868 in Leicester, England, and died on 14 December 1941, during the second year of another world war. She is remembered chiefly, and controversially, as one of the most conspicuous popular poets of British patriotic verse during the First World War. Yet to reduce her entirely to the recruitment poems that later generations have found disturbing is to overlook the long, energetic, and…
Neighbourhood:
Light Verse Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Irony, Joy
Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812 at Southampton Cottage, Camberwell, then a semi-rural district south of London, and died on 12 December 1889 in Venice. Few English poets have combined such audacity of intellect, dramatic energy, moral curiosity, and technical resourcefulness. During his lifetime he moved from the position of a puzzling, frequently mocked young writer to that of a revered elder of Victorian let…
“All you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas—or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder