Walter Savage Landor

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Walter Savage Landor
Walter Savage Landor, portrait by William Fisher

Walter Savage Landor (born January 30, 1775 in Ipsley Court , Warwickshire , † September 17, 1864 in Florence ) was an English poet and writer .

life and work

Walter Savage Landor came from an old, wealthy family in Warwickshire and was born in 1775 at their ancestral home in Ipsley Court as the son of the wealthy doctor Walter Landor and his second wife Elizabeth Savage. He was suspended from his rugby school for disrespect. From 1793 he attended Trinity College , Oxford , where he studied law. There he was enthusiastic about French republican ideas, showed an uncontrollable and extravagant behavior and was given the nickname “the crazy Jacobin ”. In 1794 he shot through the window of a Tory he hated and was expelled from the university. He spurned returning there and, after a short stay in London, turned to Swansea in Wales , where he studied poetry. The relegation from college had resulted in an argument with his father, but he was reconciled with his family through the efforts of his friend Dorothea Lyttelton; his father granted him an annual income of £ 150.

Landor's literary work had already begun during his studies at Oxford and included classical epigrams as well as poems and dramas. But he also became famous for his polished prose; Friedrich Nietzsche praises Landor as one of only four “masters of prose” in the 19th century.

Already at the age of 20 Landor published a volume of Poems (1795), which are characterized by a strong, pithy style, noble, pure language, and epigrammatically sharp satire. Three years later he wrote the still less successful heroic poem Gebir , about fire worshipers , which gave him Southey's lifelong friendship . In the second revised and expanded edition (1803), Gebir appeared at the same time in a Latin translation, which matched the original in elegance and language and demonstrated an extraordinary mastery in Latin.

After Landor took up his considerable inheritance after his father's death in 1805, he resided in Bath . In addition to his inheritance, he acquired other lands, but, tired of the complaints of rural life, sold all of his property in 1806, some of which had been in his family for 700 years. Reluctant to be shackled, he refused to join the army or the administration of justice, traveled to the mainland, when the Spaniards rose against Napoleon in 1808, he recruited a free corps in England at his own expense and headed them to General Blake , the commander in chief in Galicia . He also made a gift of 20,000 reals to the junta for battle and was made a colonel in the Spanish army. However, after just three months, the Cintra Convention came into being ; Landor's corps disbanded and he returned to England. He processed the failure of the company in the drama Count Julian (1812), his first literary success. When Ferdinand VII overturned the liberal constitution after his restoration to the Spanish throne in 1814 , Landor indignantly returned his officer's license.

On May 24, 1811, Landor had married Julia Thuillier, the daughter of an impoverished Swiss banker, but the marriage was not a happy one. In June 1811 he settled at Llanthony Abbey in Monmouthshire , but conflicts with neighbors and local authorities made his stay uncomfortable. So he set off on a journey in 1814. He lived in Tours for a while , then for three years until 1818 in Como , then in Pisa , until he found a longer stay in Florence in 1821 , where he wrote most of his writings. In 1829 he moved to Fiesole . In 1835 he separated from his wife, gave her almost all of his fortune and went to England. He lived in Bath for many years until 1858 and gradually became lonely.

Landor's main work, which he wrote during his stay in Florence, was the "fictional conversations": Imaginary Conversations between Literary Men and Statesmen (2 vol., 1824; 2nd edition, 3 vol., 1826; second series, 2 vol., 1829; new edition. by CG Crump, 6 vols., London 1891–92: German selection by E. Oswald, Paderborn 1878; further German ed. by R. Borchardt, 1923), to which the correspondence Pericles and Aspasia (2 vols., 1836) followed. They belong to the genre of the so-called funeral conversations, brought up by Lukian , and surprise with their knowledge of life, the dramatic power and care of the prose style. In the Imaginary Conversations 150 idiosyncratic dialogues of outstanding historical personalities about literary and political subjects are described. Landor also wrote The Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare Touching Deerstealing (1834) and The Pentameron and Pentalogia (1837) in prose works .

Landor wrote the dramas Andrea of ​​Hungary and Giovanna of Naples in 1839. Seven years later, in 1846, he edited the historical novel Fawn of Sertorius . In 1847 he published his most important Latin work, Poemata et Inscriptiones , which comprised the main content of two earlier volumes of idyllic, satirical and lyrical verses along with extensive additions. His poems Hellenics (1847) also appeared in the same year . In The Last Fruit of an Old Tree (London 1853) the author wrote not only new conversations, but also critical and controversial essays, various epigrams and occasional poems and concluded with fine scenes of the death of Beatrice Cenci . In 1856 he published Antony and Octavius - Scenes for the Study , twelve consecutive poems in dialogue form.

Landor's work Dry Sticks Fagoted was published in 1858 . In the same year he was embroiled in a scandalous process for offending a lady with anonymous letters and mocking poems. The court sentenced him to a fine of £ 1,000. He could not or did not want to pay this high fine and returned to Italy in July 1858, where he lived mostly in Florence. There he died at the age of 89 on September 17, 1864. In the previous year he had written Heroic Idylls, with Additional Poems with the touching poem The Death of Homer .

In all of his work, Landor had taken a politically very liberal point of view and took an active part in liberal politics throughout his life, both in writing and in action. From Napoleon III. with whom he had long been friends, he had turned away from Villafranca after the armistice . From Mina and Bolívar to Kossuth and Garibaldi , the pioneers of national or liberal struggles had his active sympathy.

A complete edition of Landor's works, who had also written many contributions to the weekly Examiner , was published in London in 1876 as Walter Savage Landor's works and life in 8 volumes (with the biography of John Forster as 1st volume). The Private and public letters of Walter Savage Landor were edited by Stephen Wheeler (London 1899). He also edited Landor's Poetry (4 volumes, 1933–36), as well as G. Grigson ( Poems , 1964). T. E. Welby also organized an edition of Landor's Complete Works (12 volumes, 1927–31; 16 volumes, 1969).

His grandson Arnold Henry Savage Landor was a successful explorer and travel writer.

Works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ National Portrait Gallery, London
  2. ↑ The other three are Giacomo Leopardi , Prosper Mérimée and Ralph Waldo Emerson . Friedrich Nietzsche: The happy science , 2nd book, section 92, quoted from: ders., Critical study edition , ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. New edition dtv, Munich 1999, Volume 3, p. 448.
personal data
SURNAME Landor, Walter Savage
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1775
PLACE OF BIRTH Ipsley Court , Warwick
DATE OF DEATH 17th September 1864
Place of death Florence