William Watson was born on 2 August 1858 at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire, and died on 11 August 1935 at Ditchling, Sussex. During his lifetime he occupied a curious and at times conspicuous place in English literary culture. He was praised as one of the finest inheritors of the Victorian poetic tradition, repeatedly mentioned as a possible Poet Laureate, admired for his disciplined music and moral seriousness, and…
“Surely the best critic is he who, neither ashamed of admiring when he can, nor afraid of reprehending when he ought, does not ask the reader to take his admiration or reprehension on trust, but vindicates both by adducing such reasons as in all ages have sufficed to demonstrate why masterpieces are masterpieces, and why failures are failures.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
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…
“As most of the poets translated are my immediate contemporaries”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
