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…
“If a poet really sorrows over the death of a friend to that degree that he cannot, as a relief to the soul, refrain from pouring out his sorrow in song, I think his utterance should be natural and straightforward.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Aubrey Thomas de Vere was born on 10 January 1814 at Curragh Chase, the family estate near Adare in County Limerick, Ireland, and died there on 20 January 1902, ten days after his eighty-eighth birthday. He belonged to a world of inherited land, cultivated learning, Protestant Ascendancy privilege, and literary ambition, yet much of his life was spent interrogating the moral assumptions of that world. In the course o…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Sorrow