George Crabbe was born on 24 December 1754 in Aldeburgh, a small Suffolk fishing port on the North Sea coast, and died on 3 February 1832 at Trowbridge in Wiltshire. He lived through a period of extraordinary literary and political change: the later eighteenth century’s polished, rule-conscious verse gave way to Romanticism’s exaltation of imagination, nature, and individual feeling; the French Revolution altered Eur…
“A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Spirituality
Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in progress, confidence in religious doctrine, confidence in moral formulas, and confidence that elevated poe…
“Ignorance is a poor kind of innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, and as innocent as the innocent; and it has long been found out what is the best way of taking things.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
