Charles Harding Firth was born in Sheffield on 16 March 1857, into a family whose prosperity, civic conscience, and intellectual ambitions helped to shape his future. His father, Mark Firth, was a prominent steel manufacturer, philanthropist, and public figure whose wealth was tied to the industrial transformation of nineteenth-century Sheffield. Yet the younger Firth’s enduring interests lay not in the furnaces and…
“Your little pool feels every wind and reflects the stars; your little plot of ground becomes a miniature world, reproducing the greater one without.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“True, a man's first book of poetry may run into a second edition, but people should not write and congratulate him on his success before they know what that means.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
