Matthew Arnold was born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham, Middlesex, a village beside the Thames, and died suddenly on 15 April 1888 at Liverpool. He became one of the defining English voices of the Victorian age: a poet of haunting melancholy, a critic who sought standards of excellence amid cultural confusion, an educational civil servant with an unusually broad public vision, and a controversial commentator on relig…
“Literature is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in the small town of Motihari in the Bengal Presidency of British India, emerged as one of the twentieth century’s most piercing literary voices. Though often remembered first as a novelist and essayist whose works dissected totalitarianism, social injustice, and the hypocrisies of power, Orwell began his writing life with poetry. Those early verses, lyrical yet…
“What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.”
Neighbourhood:
Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Longing, Sorrow
