Walter Savage Landor

Walter Savage Landor, an English writer, poet, and activist, was born on January 30, 1775, in Warwick, England, to Walter Landor, a physician who inherited a large estate in Staffordshire, and Elizabeth Savage, heiress to a more modest Warwickshire fortune. Both Savage Landor’s early education at Rugby School and short-lived academic stint at Trinity College were emblematic of his rebellious temperament. In 1794, during his second year at Trinity College, he was suspended for a year following a shooting incident in which he fired his shotgun at a fellow student. Although he was allowed to return, Landor refused. He then moved to London where he privately studied French, Greek, and Italian.

Savage Landor is most celebrated for Imaginary Conversations (1824–29), a multivolume prose series that engages in dialogue with historical figures from across Europe. Other notable works include Gebir (Slatter and Munday, 1803), an epic poem which earned Landor early critical acclaim; Pericles and Aspasia (Saunders and Otley, 1836); The Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor (Edward Moxon, 1847); The Last Fruit off an Old Tree (Edward Moxon, 1853); and his final collection of poetry published when he was eighty-eight years old, Heroic Idyls, with Additional Poems (T. Cautley Newby, 1863).

Savage Landor died on September 17, 1864, in Florence, Italy, and is buried at English Cemetery, Florence, among several other literary figures.