Profession: poet

Macpherson’s considerable influence on Romanticist writers and others (not least in Germany) stemmed from his epic poem ‘Ossian’, now known to have been woven together from fictitious (purportedly 3rd-century) Gaelic fragments. Hume was initially a supporter, helping fund a trip to the Highlands, supposedly to seek more such fragments. Gray liked what he read and wrote to Macpherson; the language of the reply changed his opinion. Johnson, who met and corresponded with Macpherson, scathingly attacked his claimed authenticity; Macpherson threatened him with physical violence, but went quiet when Johnson went public.

Gray is regarded, after Pope, as the most important English 18th-century poet, despite being a severely self-censoring perfectionist (only thirteen pieces published in a lifetime). Walpole was a schoolfriend from the age of nine; they went on the Grand Tour together, quarrelled over their irreconcilable tastes, but made up later, Walpole’s influence helping Gray’s work get published, and Gray writing an ode to the death by drowning (in a goldfish bowl) of Walpole’s cat. Notoriously reserved, Gray had few other friends, though friends or acquaintances probably included Goldsmith, Cowper, and perhaps Boswell and Johnson; Smart was a university colleague.

Chatterton was admired as a forerunner by all of the major English Romantic poets (Keats dedicated ‘Endymion’ to him), even if the myth they fostered overshadowed his actual achievement. He was a precocious poet and forger of supposedly medieval literary documents, whose early garret death (whether accident or not) only helped promote his posthumous image. Aged sixteen, he sent the wealthy Walpole some of his work, hoping for patronage. Walpole, initially taken in, showed the manuscript to Thomas Gray, who saw it as the imaginative fakery it was; Walpole rebuffed Chatterton’s appeal for help, but regretted it for life.

J. S. Bach set nine of Ziegler’s texts to music; both were based in Leipzig at the time, had friends in common and in all likelihood knew each other, though there is no written record of a direct personal connection (as certainly existed between other family members). Gottsched, known for his unusual support of women writers, may have lodged with her family when he first arrived in Leipzig, and was a leading member of the circle who habitually met in her house. He became her mentor and sponsor, and was responsible for recommending that Wittenberg University elect her imperial poet laureate.

Crabbe is known from a small number of unsentimentally realist works written across 40 years; he owes his contemporary significance mainly to Britten’s reworking of one of his tales. He often visited Reynolds, at whose house he met Johnson, who famously contributed some lines to the poem that first got him noticed. Both Scott and Leadbeater enjoyed long correspondences with him. Wordsworth, who shared a publisher, thought he had no imagination, and puzzled that he didn’t take more pride in his workmanship. Southey, Edgeworth and Wilberforce, as well as Wordsworth, were met in London late in his life.

The ‘peasant poet’ Clare met Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge and de Quincey on his second or third London visit, at the London Magazine’s editor’s literary dinners. Lamb (who became a particular friend) and Hazlitt (whom he admired for his originality) shared with him an appreciation of old poets; De Quincey regretted his taste for “French actresses”, while he was astonished by de Quincey’s oddness and vulgarity. While Clare enjoyed these boozy evenings and other London attractions, his literary socialising sadly only alienated him from his fellow-villagers. No-one knows whether Tennyson and he, in the same asylum at the same time, actually met.