Gerald Griffin

12 December 1803 – 12 June 1840 (~37)

1 live poem · English

Gerald Griffin was born in Limerick on 12 December 1803 and died in Cork on 12 June 1840, before his thirty-seventh birthday. His life was brief, restless, and divided between two vocations that seemed, in his own mind, increasingly irreconcilable: literature and religious service. In less than two decades of serious writing, he became one of the most distinctive Irish novelists of the early nineteenth century, a poe…

“Nothing is more commonplace, either in prose or poetry, than for those who live in the bustle of the world to wish for some quiet little retreat in a lonely wild, where, free from cares... at the same time that, if the truth was known, they had rather die than give up their darling turmoil.”

Gerald Gould

9 April 1885 – 2 November 1936 (~51)

2 live poems · English

In the landscape of early twentieth-century English poetry, Gerald Gould occupies a curious position—too well-known to have been forgotten entirely, yet too overlooked to claim his rightful place in the literary canon. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1885 and raised in Norwich, Gould lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, a time when the certainties of the Victorian age gave way to the…

“The civilisation and social structure of our country, rightly or wrongly, take for granted that a few people shall have a lot of money and a lot of power, and a great many people very little money and very little power.”