I lived from 1841-1901.
I was from England, and am in the English category.
Robert Buchanan was born in Staffordshire, on the 18th of August 1841. His father, a native of Ayr, lived for some years in Manchester but moved to Glasgow, where Buchanan was educated, at the high school and the university, one of his fellow-students being the poet David Gray.
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Robert Buchanan was born in Staffordshire, on the 18th of August 1841. His father, a native of Ayr, lived for some years in Manchester but moved to Glasgow, where Buchanan was educated, at the high school and the university, one of his fellow-students being the poet David Gray.
Buchanan and Gray journeyed together to London and their early hardship and struggles is told in an essay they wrote about Gray for the Cornhill Magazine
After his early struggles Buchanan published Undertones in 1863. This was followed by Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865), London Poems (1866), and North Coast and other Poems (1868), in which he displayed a faculty for poetic narrative, and a sympathetic insight into the humbler conditions of life.
Buchanan is, perhaps, at his best in these narrative poems, though he tried more ambitious topics in The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic, a study in mysticism, which appeared in 1870.
He was a frequent contributor to periodicals at that time, and achieved some notoriety with an article written under the nom de plume of Thomas Maitland, that he contributed to the Contemporary Review for October 1871 This was entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” and the article was expanded into a pamphlet (1872), but he subsequently withdrew it because of the criticisms it contained, and it is now chiefly remembered for the replies it evoked from D. G. Rossetti in a letter to the Athenaeum (16th December 1871), entitled “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” and from Swinburne in Under the Microscope (1872). Buchanan himself afterwards regretted the violence of his attack later dedicated God and the Man to Rossetti.
The Shadow of the Sword appeared in 1876, the first and one of the best of a long series of novels. Buchanan was also the author of many successful plays and he also wrote, in collaboration with Harriett Jay, the melodrama Alone in London. Harriet was both his adopted daughter and his sister in law!
In the autumn of 1900 he had a paralytic seizure, from which he never recovered. He died at Streatham on the 10th of June 1901.
Information gained mainly from the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Jim Saville
My poetry
'Twas the body of Judas Iscariot
Lay in the Field of Blood;
244 lines
Is it not pleasant to wander
In town on Saturday night,
196 lines
Sad, and sweet, and wise,
Here a child reposes,
36 lines, 3 comments
NOW, when the catkins of the hazel swing
Wither'd above the leafy nook wherein
165 lines
With fairy foot and fearless gaze
She passes pure through evil ways;
11 lines
THE CRIMSON light of sunset falls
Through the grey glamour of the murmuring rain,
12 lines
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