William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the northwestern corner of England, and died on 23 April 1850 at Rydal Mount in the Lake District. Few poets have altered English literary culture so thoroughly. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth helped establish the principles of British Romanticism: a new seriousness about ordinary life, a conviction that emotional experience could be…
“These people, in the senseless hurry of their idle lives, do not read books, they merely snatch a glance at them, that they may talk about them.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing
In the quiet churchyard of St. Giles' Church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, lies a simple grave that has drawn literary pilgrims for centuries. Here rests Thomas Gray (1716-1771), a man whose single greatest poem transformed him from an obscure Cambridge scholar into one of the most quoted poets in the English language. Yet Gray himself was a study in contradictions—a reluctant celebrity who shunned fame, a brillia…
“The language of the age is never the language of poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
