Aurora Leigh – Love and Revolution - 2cyberwhelm.org

England’s poet laureates (no Browning among them!)
Edmund Spenser 1591–1599
Samuel Daniel 1599–1619
Ben Jonson 1619–1637
William Davenant 1638–1668
John Dryden 1668–1689
Thomas Shadwell 1689–1692
Nahum Tate 1692–1715
Nicholas Rowe 1715–1718
Laurence Eusden 1718–1730
Colley Cibber 1730–1757
William Whitehead 1757–1785
Thomas Warton 1785–1790
Henry James Pye 1790–1813
Robert Southey 1813–1843
William Wordsworth 1843–1850
Alfred Lord Tennyson 1850–1892
Alfred Austin 1896–1913
Robert Bridges 1913–1930
John Masefield 1930–1967
Cecil Day-Lewis 1967–1972
Sir John Betjeman 1972–1984
Ted Hughes 1984–1998
Andrew Motion 1999-
article which appeared in the 1874 Cornhill Magazine, pp. 471-90
It was taken for this press release from the Victorian Web on 4/23/04
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/cornhill.html
[Elizabeth Barrett Browning] has demonstrated what emotional poetry really means…and it cannot be said,
either, that she has altogether come short in the matter of design -- the design which stamps the greatest poets.
…Her history, sparse as it is in facts as yet given to the world, is one of intense interest. It is well known how that
existence with her was almost one long round of continuous suffering... Her own sufferings could never daunt her
in the pursuit of learning, and accordingly we find that as a scholar she was distinguished for the ripest erudition.
…The human heart first, and Nature afterwards, were the teachers at whose feet our poet learned the deep lessons
she subsequently transmitted to her species. By these were fostered in her a tenderness which breathes through all
her writings, and whose spirit is mirrored therein as the blue sky mirrors itself upon the bosom of the deep.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Life
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in London, in the year 1809…At a very early age she had written much that
was worthy … Miss Mitford has described her as a "slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on
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