Revolution and Romanticism

A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth

ISBN 1 85477 244 9

234 x 180 mm 56pages

JOHN THELWALL

Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower 1795

Along with Hardy, Horne Took and other leading British radicals, Thelwall was arrested in May 1794, taken to the Tower, and later charged with High Treason. If convicted, they stood to be hanged, drawn and quartered (as many had been after the Jacobite rebellion fifty years before) but the twelve sonnets, two odes and various occasional poems - 'Short is perhaps our date of life' - of Poems Written in Close Confinement have about them surprising poise and calm.

£37.50 $65

‘Tis not how long we have to live,
But how much pleasure is to come,
That real wisdom would enquire,
Could oracles proclaim our doom....

Then let us seize the present hour,
The bliss within our grasp enjoy;
Since well we know, bliss once possess’d
Not Jove himself can e’er destroy.

(from ‘Anacreontic’)



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Poetry of the 1890s