Douglas Hyde was born on 17 January 1860, near Castlerea in County Roscommon, into an Ireland whose languages, loyalties, and social memories were deeply divided. He died on 12 July 1949, having lived long enough to see the cultural cause that had occupied his youth become central to the public identity of an independent state. He was a poet, translator, folklorist, editor, scholar, teacher, cultural organizer, and,…
“If we allow one of the finest and the richest languages in Europe, which, fifty years ago, was spoken by nearly four million Irishmen, to die out without a struggle, it will be an everlasting disgrace, and a blighting stigma upon our nationality.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Irony
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“I have been represented as saying with Baudelaire, ‘Art for Art’, and laying myself open to all the unfavourable limitations which that dictum is unjustly supposed to imply.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
