Robert William Service was born on 16 January 1874 in Preston, Lancashire, England, and died on 11 September 1958 at Lancieux, in Brittany, France. Few poets have occupied quite the cultural territory that Service came to possess. He was not, by his own candid admission, a poet of intricate philosophical argument or formal innovation. He called much of what he wrote “verse” rather than “poetry,” a distinction that re…
“The only society I like is rough and tough, and the tougher the better. There's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Despair, Sorrow
Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“Like champagne, the brightest iridescences of wit depend upon the surrounding atmosphere, and cease to shine when they cease to reflect its immediate influence.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
