GEORGE DARLEY (1847)

Poet and critic little esteemed by his contemporaries but praised by 20th-century writters for his intense evocation, in his unfinished lyrical epic Nepenthe (1835), of a symbolic dreamworld. Long regarded as unreadable this epic came to be admired in the 20th century for its dream imagery, use of symbolism to reveal inner consciousness and tumultuous metrical organization which exemplify late English Romanticism and anticipate tendencies in modern poetry.

He is also remembered for lyrics illustrating his belied that "the secret of true poetry" is the setting "of beautiful thoughts to verbal music".

Darley became a free-lance writer in London in 1821. A perceptive critic, he wrote for the literary London Magazine and other journals, meanwhile publishing a succession of failures, The Errors of Ecstasie (1822, poems), The Labours of Idleness (1826, stories and poems), the poetic drama Sylvia (1827), Nepenthe and two verse dramas, Thomas à Becket (1840) and Ethelstan (1841), the former showing dramatic ability in use of contrast, the latter indicating by its subject Darley´s interest in the Anglo-Saxon period.

In his own day, Darley´s greatest successes were mathematical textbooks. Combined with his failure as a creative writer, an incurable stammer sapped his self-confidence, but he kept in touch with his many friends by letter writing, at which he excelled.