Ebenezer Elliott was born on 17 March 1781 at Masbrough, near Rotherham, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and died on 1 December 1849 at Great Houghton, near Barnsley. He became known in his own lifetime as the “Corn Law Rhymer,” a title at once admiring, limiting, and revealing. It identified him with the campaign against the laws that kept imported grain expensive and bread beyond the reach of many poor families, b…
“What is a communist? One who hath yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings: idler or bungler, or both, he is willing to fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Anger, Sorrow, Fear
William Collins, born in Chichester on 25 December 1721 and dead there on 12 June 1759, occupies a small but luminous space in English literary history. He published little, lived only thirty-seven years, and spent much of his adult life under the shadow of debt, disappointment, and severe mental distress. Yet a handful of poems, especially the odes issued in 1746, have secured him a place among the most distinctive…
“I have but one book, but that is the best.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Tenderness
