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
Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in progress, confidence in religious doctrine, confidence in moral formulas, and confidence that elevated poe…
“All things become clear to me by work more than by anything else. Any kind of drudgery will help one out of the most uncommon either sentimental or speculative perplexity.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
