Matthew Arnold was born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham, Middlesex, a village beside the Thames, and died suddenly on 15 April 1888 at Liverpool. He became one of the defining English voices of the Victorian age: a poet of haunting melancholy, a critic who sought standards of excellence amid cultural confusion, an educational civil servant with an unusually broad public vision, and a controversial commentator on relig…
“Literature is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
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…
“Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things, and I'll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
