IGCSE With Mrs C

Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening by Charlotte Smith (1749 – 1806) Date of poem: 1798-1800 Charlotte Smith , born Turner (born May 4, 1749,  London , England and died Oct. 28, 1806, Tilford, Surrey, England), English novelist and poet, highly praised by the novelist  Sir Walter Scott . Her poetic attitude toward nature was reminiscent of  William Cowper’s   in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures of the English countryside. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Smith Biographical Detail:   « Charlotte Smith wrote  Elegiac Sonnets in 1783 while she was in debtor’s prison with her husband and children. William Wordsworth identified her as an important influence on the Romantic movement. She published several longer works that celebrated the individual while deploring social injustice and the British class system. » https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charlotte-smith The Romantic Movement: The most notable featu...

Elizabeth Jennings (18 July 1926- 26 October 2001) Born in the United Kingdom in Boston, Lincolnshire, she moved to Oxford when she was 6 years old and stayed there for the rest of her life. She attended Oxford University as a student in St Anne's College, and started publishing her poetry in local periodicals like Oxford Poetry and British journals such as The Spectator and New English Weekly. She became a librarian at the Oxford City library. At the age of 27, she published her first book, Poems (1953). The next year, her second book was published, A Way of Looking (1954), which won the Somerset Maugham prize and set off her public recognition as a poet. With the prize money, she lived for several months in Rome, which inspired her greatly. She was a Roman Catholic with religious beliefs and imagination, and although she suffered from mental illness at one point in her life, her poetry is recognized for its simplicity of form and its traditionalism, and she was inspired by suc...