{\b Walter Savage Landor}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 30 January 1775

{\b Date of Death}.: 17 September 1864

{\b Works}.

Poems of Sir Walter Savage Landor  (1795), Gebir  (1798) later published in 
Latin verse as Gebirus  (1803), Poetry of the Author of Gebir  (1802), Count 
Julian  (1812), Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen  (5 
volumes 1824-29), Pericles and Aspasia  (1836), The Pentameron and Pentalogia  
(1837), Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans  (1853), Dry Sticks, 
Fagoted by Walter Savage Landor  (1858).

{\b Featured Works}.

'Ireland', 'Alas! 'Tis Very Sad to Hear', 'Lately Our Poets Loitered in Green 
Lanes', 'On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday', 'Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel', 
'Rose Aylmer', 'Autumn', 'Ianthe', 'Dirce', 'Verse', 'Corinna, from Athens, to 
Tanagra', 'The Maid's Lament', 'Ianthe's Question', 'Proud Word You Never 
Spoke', 'Of Clementina', 'On Catullus', 'The Dragon-Fly', 'Years', 'To Robert 
Browning', 'On an Eclipse of the Moon', 'Alciphron and Leucippe'.

{\b General Comment}.

Poet and prose writer, Walter Savage Landor was born at Ipsley Court, Warwick. 
The son of a doctor and a wealthy mother, he was educated at Rugby from which 
he was removed for insolence. He was also suspended from Trinity College, 
Oxford for firing off a shotgun in his rooms. In 1808 he fought as a volunteer 
for the Spanish War of Liberation against the French, subsidising it 
personally. He inherited the family property in Staffordshire in 1805 and sold 
it to buy Llanthony Abbey in Wales it shortly before marrying a seventeen year 
old, Julia Thuiller in 1811. Having been sued for libel, he and his wife went 
into exile in Italy. He was also threatened with expulsion from Florence for 
being insulting to the local police and for writing condemnatory material 
about Italy in Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen  (1824-29).

In 1835 he parted from his wife and four children and returned to England with 
Pericles and Aspasia  (1836), a rendering of classical Athens through a series 
of imaginary letters. He was also a friend of Charles Dickens who represented 
him as Boythorn in Bleak House  and of John Forester who was to write his 
biography. His most notable prose works of this period are The Pentameron and 
Pentalogia  (1837), which is a dialogue between Petrarch and Boccaccio, and 
Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans  (1853). In 1858, under the cloud 
of a pending libel case due to some satirical verses he had written on a local 
woman - Dry Sticks, Fagoted by Walter Savage Landor  - he once again left for 
Italy. Eventually he fled to Florence to live with Elizabeth Barrett and 
Robert Browning, where he died in 1864 having written poems to Elizabeth which 
were printed in 1917.