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…
“because it is rather a shy process to send a shoulder of mutton to the owner of a deer park.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Robert William Service was born on 16 January 1874 in Preston, Lancashire, England, and died on 11 September 1958 at Lancieux, in Brittany, France. Few poets have occupied quite the cultural territory that Service came to possess. He was not, by his own candid admission, a poet of intricate philosophical argument or formal innovation. He called much of what he wrote “verse” rather than “poetry,” a distinction that re…
“Shirk responsibility—that's my philosophy. I do feel a sense of responsibility to the poor, but I don't want to go beyond writing a check.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Despair, Sorrow
