James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality
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…
“Poetry is the image of man and nature.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing
