Thomas Campbell (poet)

Thomas Campbell

Thomas Campbell (born July 27, 1777 in Glasgow , † June 15, 1844 in Boulogne-sur-Mer ) was a Scottish poet . Lord Byron valued Campbell's works more than Wordsworth or Coleridge .

Life and work

Campbell was the youngest of eleven children. It is named after the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid , with whom his father Alexander Campbell, a country nobleman , was close friends. Thomas attended the oldest school in Scotland, the Church High School in Glasgow, and then went on to study at the local university .

He spent his holidays repeatedly in Argyllshire , where his family, the Clan Campbell , originally came from and where he began to write poetry. Here also was Love and madness . In 1795 he went to Mull , an island in the Inner Hebrides, as a tutor .

In 1797 Campbell moved to Edinburgh to study law . There he published The Pleasures of Hope in 1799 , in which, as Meyers Konversationslexikon wrote from 1885: "Melodious language and noble disposition gained such acclaim that four editions were necessary in the first year." It took up current issues: the French Revolution , the Partitions of Poland , slavery .

In 1800 Campbell traveled for some time in Germany , visited Klopstock in Hamburg and Heyne in Göttingen , where he expanded his philological knowledge. The Second Coalition War forced him to return home. The exile of Erin , Hohenlinden and Ye Mariners of England were created during the long journey . On the occasion of the preemptive strike against Denmark, he rushed back to Edinburgh, where he wrote the patriotic poem "The Battle of the Baltic". His ballad Lochiel's Warning comes from the saying “future events cast their shadows before”.

In 1802 he moved to Sydenham near London and published a number of other literary works, including for the "Edinburgh Encyclopedia". The high point of his work was the Annals of Great Britain from the accession of George III, completed in 1808 . to the peace of Amiens , which was followed in 1809 by the poetic tale Gertrude of Wyoming , which was the inspiration behind the name of today's state of Wyoming . His later poems were of a minor nature.

After a second trip to Germany, he published his Specimens of the British poets in 1818 , a selection of English poems accompanied by critical and biographical notes. In 1820 he founded " The New Monthly Magazine ", which he directed until 1830. In 1825 he developed the idea and drafted the plan for the establishment of the University of London , as students were increasingly excluded from studying at Oxford or Cambridge for religious reasons or because of lack of money .

The University of Glasgow elected him from 1826 to 1829 as their Lord Rector . A trip to Algiers in 1837 gave him the opportunity to write the Letters from the South , which were followed by the biographical works Life of Mrs. Siddons (1837), Life of Petrarch (1841), Frederick the Great, his court and times (1843).

It is said that he was married and that his wife died in 1828. Of her two sons, one died as a baby and the other became insane. Campbell himself died on June 15, 1844 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey (London).

swell

Campbell, Thomas, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved on September 10, 2006 from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD.
Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911.
Meyers Konversations-Lexikon from 1885.

Web links

Literature by and about Thomas Campbell in the catalog of the German National Library
Works by and about Thomas Campbell in the German Digital Library

Individual evidence

^ Byron, George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron: Byron's 1813 diary . Project Gutenberg. Retrieved June 13, 2006.
↑ The poem in Stanzen in the follow-up to Spenser describes the events of 1778 in the valley of Wyoming , Pennsylvania , in which English loyalists in alliance with the Iroquois fought a bloody battle with American independence fighters. The former federal territory or the new state of Wyoming was named after the setting of this very popular rhyming epic in 1890 . German edition under the title Gertrud von Wyoming or Die Pennsylvanische Hütte (1882).

personal data
SURNAME	Campbell, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Scottish poet
DATE OF BIRTH	July 27, 1777
PLACE OF BIRTH	Glasgow
DATE OF DEATH	June 15, 1844
Place of death	Boulogne-sur-Mer

[1] Byron, George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron: Byron's 1813 diary . Project Gutenberg. Retrieved June 13, 2006.

[2] The poem in Stanzen in the follow-up to Spenser describes the events of 1778 in the valley of Wyoming , Pennsylvania , in which English loyalists in alliance with the Iroquois fought a bloody battle with American independence fighters. The former federal territory or the new state of Wyoming was named after the setting of this very popular rhyming epic in 1890 . German edition under the title Gertrud von Wyoming or Die Pennsylvanische Hütte (1882).