Many poets who don't receive fame and praise during their life rise to popularity only after their death. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) had the opposite problem. During his life, he was a major influence on many of the poets known to us today, but Landor is little known now. One of the few places his work is found is in the anthology "Immortal Lyrics."
Landor was best known for his epigrams, which are short, often witty poems that concisely convey a complex idea. He also wrote "Imaginary Conversations," a series of dialogues between historical and mythological figures on moral, political, and philosophical topics. During his life, he counted many famous writers among his friends, including Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. He is said to have influenced writers such as William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound.
Though he lived during the Romantic period (late 18th to early 19th century), Landor shared few characteristics with the Romantic poets of his time. However, like the Romantic poets, Landor was fascinated with the past and the classics. He was a classicist who composed poetry and prose in both English and Latin that emphasized objectivity and had a turn of phrase influenced by Greek and Latin poetry. His works are a contrast to the Romantic works of his time that celebrated subjectivity, emotional themes, and individualism.
As Landor observed, though all things fall prey to time, his poetry breathed new life into the classics, not reliving of the same old scenes but as a continuation of the past. If he seemed an anachronism in the literary scene of his age, he assumed a timelessness characteristic of the classics he drew upon. Landor's work assumes an immortality and value that carries over into our own age as well and merits rediscovery.