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…
“Indeed, what I am about to give to the world resembles rather a spirit distilled from the vin ordinaire of a life-talk, and bottled for future use, than a literary production.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Charles Wolfe, born on 14 December 1791 and dead on 21 February 1823, occupies a small but secure territory in the history of poetry written in English. His name is inseparable from “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” a poem so concise, grave, and memorable that it has long outlived the circumstances of its composition and, in many readers’ minds, eclipsed the life of the man who wrote it. For much of the n…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Irish Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
