Edgar Allan Poe stands as one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in American literature, a writer whose troubled life and haunting works have captivated readers for nearly two centuries. Born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, he would live only forty years before his mysterious death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland. Yet in that brief span, he revolutionized multiple litera…
“With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Gerald Griffin was born in Limerick on 12 December 1803 and died in Cork on 12 June 1840, before his thirty-seventh birthday. His life was brief, restless, and divided between two vocations that seemed, in his own mind, increasingly irreconcilable: literature and religious service. In less than two decades of serious writing, he became one of the most distinctive Irish novelists of the early nineteenth century, a poe…
“Nothing is more commonplace, either in prose or poetry, than for those who live in the bustle of the world to wish for some quiet little retreat in a lonely wild, where, free from cares... at the same time that, if the truth was known, they had rather die than give up their darling turmoil.”
Neighbourhood:
Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder
