Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Arthur O'Shaughnessy | |
---|---|
Born | 14 March 1844 London, England |
Died | 30 January 1881 London, England | (aged 36)
Spouse |
Eleanor Marston
(m. 1873; died 1879) |
Children | 2 |
Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (14 March 1844 – 30 January 1881) was a British poet and
Early life and herpetology
In June 1861, at age 17, Arthur O'Shaughnessy received the post of transcriber in the library of the
Poetry
However, O'Shaughnessy's true passion was for literature. He published his first collection of poetry, Epic of Women, in 1870, followed two years later by Lays of France in 1872, and then Music and Moonlight in 1874. He is now best remembered for the first poem in his collection Music and Moonlight, entitled "Ode", which begins with the words: "We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams".[3]
O'Shaughnessy's most quoted poem is his ode to the place of art, beginning
We are the music-makers.
And we are the dreamers of dreams.
Wandering by lone sea-breakers.
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers.
On whom the pale moon gleams
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems
When he was 30, he married and did not produce any more volumes of poetry for the last seven years of his life. His last volume, Songs of a Worker, was published posthumously in 1881. O'Shaughnessy was both formally and aesthetically cutting-edge. For example, he is one of the few Pre-Raphaelite poets to have needed a steady income, and his corpus often explores the relationship between art and work. Unlike other Pre-Raphaelites, O'Shaughnessy saw poetry as the result of toil rather than the consequence of a moment's frenetic inspiration.[4]
In his influential 1957 essay, [5] T. S. Eliot gives O'Shaughnessy as an example of "poets who have written just one, or only a few good poems," and says that, despite his uneven output, "We Are the Music Makers" belongs in any 19th century verse anthology.
Personal life
The artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were among O'Shaughnessy's circle of friends, and in 1873, he married Eleanor Marston, the daughter of author John Westland Marston and the sister of the poet Philip Bourke Marston. Together, he and his wife wrote a book of children's stories, Toy-land (1875). They had two children together, both of whom died in infancy.
Eleanor died in 1879, and O'Shaughnessy himself died in London two years later at the age of 36 from the effects of a "chill" after walking home from the theatre on a rainy night.[6] He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.
Legacy
The anthologist
O'Shaughnessy's translations of
O'Shaughnessy is commemorated in the scientific names of four species of lizards: Calumma oshaughnessyi, Cercosaura oshaughnessyi, Enyalioides oshaughnessyi, and Pachydactylus oshaughnessyi.[1]
Works
- An Epic of Women (1870)
- Lays of France (1872)
- Music and Moonlight: Poems and Songs (1874)
- Toy-land (with Eleanor W. O'Shaughnessy) (1875)
- Songs of a Worker (1881) (published posthumously)
Sources
- Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Music Maker by Molly Whittington-Egan (2013) Bluecoat Press
- Arthur O'Shaughnessy, a Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum by Jordan Kistler (2016) Routledge
References
- ^ ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5. (O'Shaughnessy, p. 197).
- ^ Moulton, Louise (1894). Arthur O'Shaughnessy: his life and his work, with selections from his poems. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone & Kimball. 120 pp. Retrieved 9 August 2011.
- ISSN 1060-1503.
- ^ Kistler, Jordan (2016). Arthur O'Shaughnessy, a Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 61.
- ^ Eliot, T. S. (1957). "What is Minor Poetry?". On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber. p. 39.
- ^ Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/arthur-oshaughnessy.
- ^ Kistler, Jordan (2016). Arthur O'Shaughnessy, a Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum. p. 140.
External links
- Media related to Arthur O'Shaughnessy at Wikimedia Commons
- Quotations related to Arthur O'Shaughnessy at Wikiquote
- Works by or about Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy at Wikisource
- Data related to Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy at Wikispecies
- Works by or about Arthur O'Shaughnessy at Internet Archive
- Works by Arthur O'Shaughnessy at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- List of O'Shaughnessy papers held at Queen's University Belfast