Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“The great desire of a good citizen should be to fill up, as far as possible, the gulfs that separate one set of Englishmen from another.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Robert Southey was born in Bristol on 12 August 1774 and died at Greta Hall, near Keswick in the Lake District, on 21 March 1843. During his lifetime he was among the most visible men of letters in Britain: a poet, historian, biographer, reviewer, editor, translator, political commentator, children’s writer, and, from 1813 until his death, Poet Laureate. Yet posterity has treated him unevenly. He is often remembered…
“The will and the power to produce anything great are not often found together.”
Neighbourhood:
Hymn Writers, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Wonder
