Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…
“There can be no doubt that Love is the test of the Beautiful; but if I had said the Beautiful is what a human being loves, a thousand facts would rise to contradict me.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“My artistic object is gained if, in them, I have kept strictly within the lines assigned to the sculptor’s art.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
