News at Eleven: This personalization of literary history

leaves little room for figures below the first rank unless they happen to be women (Hemans and Landon) or provide sturdy support for a star performer (Moore and Hunt). So Walter Savage Landor, who qualifies on none of these counts, thereby loses his place in the history of English poetry. Yet Landor was a brilliant epigrammatist, perhaps the finest of the nineteenth century--as the following bears witness:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed my hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Landor is not alone.

from The Times Literary Supplement: What is the history of English poetry?

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