Many poets who don’t receive fame and praise during their life rise to popularity only after their death. Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) had the opposite problem. During his life, he was a major influence on many of the poets known to us today, but Landor is little known now. One of the few places his work is found is in the anthology “Immortal Lyrics.”
Landor was best known for his epigrams, which are short, often witty poems that concisely convey a complex idea. He also wrote “Imaginary Conversations,” a series of dialogues between historical and mythological figures on moral, political, and philosophical topics. During his life, he counted many famous writers among his friends, including Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. He is said to have influenced writers such as William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound.
Though he lived during the Romantic period (late 18th to early 19th century), Landor shared few characteristics with the Romantic poets of his time. However, like the Romantic poets, Landor was fascinated with the past and the classics. He was a classicist who composed poetry and prose in both English and Latin that emphasized objectivity, and had a turn of phrase influenced by Greek and Latin poetry. His works are a contrast to the Romantic works of his time that celebrated subjectivity, emotional themes, and individualism.
Poems
Landor composed an extensive body of work during his almost 90 years. One of the most recognizable is a short poem titled, “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:I strove with none; for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Consisting of only one quatrain, the poem evinces pride in a life well-lived that enables him to meet death with contentment. Many of his poems dwell similarly on mortality and the passage of time, like the following epigram:On love, on grief, on every human thing, Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing
With the gathering magnitude of the repeated structure in the first line, Landor illustrates time’s vast and inescapable reach on both living things and emotions. He transforms the cliché of “time flying” into a benediction with water from the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in the underworld of Greek mythology. Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy observes that in a graceful economy of words, Landor achieves, “Delicacy and finality, a “sprinkling” that is also “lethal.” Time steals and heals, and gradually, we lose the memory of both blessing and blight.
Love and Time
Landor also wrote numerous love poems, many of which were addressed to Sophia Jane Swift, whom he called Ianthe in his poetry. Ianthe was a nymph in Greek mythology. Ianthe also means “violet flower” after another figure in Greek mythology, a girl so beautiful that the gods made purple flowers grow around her grave when she died. One of his epigrams to Ianthe reads as follows:Soon, O Ianthe! life is o’er, And sooner beauty’s heavenly smile: Grant only (and I ask no more), Let love remain that little while.
As in the case of the other two poems, Landor inspires a keen awareness of the swift passage of time and the brevity of life. However, love redeems this brevity and obliterates the need for anything else, including even heavenly beauty. The use of an ellipsis (a literary device consisting of the omission of a word or phrase that is understood) in the first two lines heightens the sensation of a rapid passage of time: Landor drops the phrase “is o’er” from the second line, where it is understood.As Landor observed, though all things fall prey to time, his poetry breathed new life into the classics, not reliving of the same old scenes but as a continuation of the past. If he seemed an anachronism in the literary scene of his age, he assumed a timelessness characteristic of the classics he drew upon. Landor’s work assumes an immortality and value that carries over into our own age as well and merits rediscovery.
