Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) was one of the most distinguished minor masters of English prose and verse — admired by Dickens, Swinburne, and Pound, though never quite a household name. This selection pairs extracts from his celebrated Imaginary Conversations (dramatic dialogues between historical figures) with his short poems, many of which are gems of concision and feeling.
His quatrain ‘On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday’ (‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’) is one of the finest short poems in English. The free EPUB is cleanly formatted throughout.