Letitia Elizabeth Landon, born on 14 August 1802 in Chelsea, London, and dead on 15 October 1838 at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, was one of the most celebrated, industrious, and misunderstood writers of the British Romantic period. Known to her immense contemporary readership by the initials “L.E.L.,” she became a literary phenomenon while still very young: a poet whose verses appeared week after week in maga…
“Poetry is even more a passion than a power, and nothing is so strongly impressed on composition as the character of the writer.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 and died there on 31 August 1867, leaving a body of work comparatively small in quantity but seismic in effect. Few writers have altered the possibilities of lyric poetry so decisively. Baudelaire inherited the grandeur and rhetoric of French Romanticism, yet he redirected poetry away from nature, historical spectacle, and heroic confession toward the nervou…
“Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l’une vers Dieu, l’autre vers Satan.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
