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William Shenstone (November 13, 1714 – February 11, 1763) was an English poet and one of the earliest practitioners of landscape gardening through the development of his estate, The Leasowes.
Life
Son of Thomas and Anne, daughter of William Penn of Harborough Hall, then in Hagley (now Blakedown), Shenstone was born at the Leasowes, Halesowen, then an enclave of Shropshire within the traditional county of Worcestershire.
At Solihull School (the school he attended), he began a lifelong friendship with Richard Jago. He went up to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1732 and made another firm friend there in Richard Graves, the author of The Spiritual Quixote.
He took no degree, but, while still at Oxford, he published Poems on various occasions, written for the entertainment of the author (1737). This edition was intended for private circulation only but, containing the first draft of The Schoolmistress, it attracted some wider attention. Shenstone tried hard to suppress it but in 1742 he published anonymously a revised draft of The Schoolmistress, a Poem in imitation of Spenser. The inspiration of the poem was Sarah Lloyd, teacher of the village school where Shenstone received his first education. Isaac D'Israeli contended that Robert Dodsley had been misled in publishing it as one of a sequence of Moral Poems, its intention having been satirical, as evidenced by the ludicrous index appended to its original publication.
In 1741 he published The Judgment of Hercules. He inherited the Leasowes estate, and retired there in 1745 to undertake what proved the chief work of his life, the beautifying of his property. He embarked on elaborate schemes of landscape gardening which gave the Leasowes a wide celebrity, but sadly impoverished the owner. Shenstone was not a contented recluse. He desired constant admiration of his gardens, and he never ceased to lament his lack of fame as a poet.
Shenstone died unmarried.
Critical appraisal
Shenstone's poems of nature were written in praise of her most artificial aspects, but the emotions they express were obviously genuine. His Schoolmistress was admired by Oliver Goldsmith, with whom Shenstone had much in common, and his Elegies written at various times and to some extent biographical in character won the praise of Robert Burns who, in the preface to Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), called him ... that celebrated poet whose divine elegies do honor to our language, our nation and our species. The best example of purely technical skill in his works is perhaps his success in the management of the anapaestic trimeter in his Pastoral Ballad in Four Parts (written in 1743), but first printed in Dodsley's Collection of Poems (vol. iv., 1755).
Memorials
- One of the five houses of Solihull School is named after him.
- Louis-René Girardin built a memorial in the French town of Ermenonville.
Works
His works were first published by his friend Robert Dodsley (3 vols., 1764-1769). The second volume contains Dodsley's description of the Leasowes. The last, consisting of correspondence with Graves, Jago and others, appeared after Dodsley's death. Other letters of Shenstone's are included in Select Letters (ed. Thomas Hill 1778). The letters of Lady Luxborough (nee Henrietta St John) to Shenstone were printed by T. Dodsley in 1775; much additional correspondence is preserved in the British Museumletters to Lady Luxborough (Add. MS. 28958), Dodsley's letters to Shenstone (Add. MS. 28959), and correspondence between Shenstone and Bishop Percy from 1757 to 1763the last being of especial interest; To Shenstone was due the original suggestion of Percy's Reliques, a service which would alone entitle him to a place among the precursors of the romantic movement in English literature. See also Richard Graves, Recollections of some particulars in the Life of the Late William Shenstone (1788); H. Sydney Grazebrook, The Family of Shenstone the Poet (1890); Lennox Morison, " Shenstone," in the Gentleman't Magazine (vol. 289, 1900, pp. 196-205); A. Chalmers, English Poets (1810, vol. xiii.), with " Life " by Samuel Johnson; his Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1854), with " Life " by G. Gilfillan; T. D'lsraeli, " The Domestic Life of a PoetShenstone vindicated," in Curiosities of Literature; and " Burns and Shenstone," in Furth in Field (1894), by " Hugh Haliburton " (J. L. Robertson).
In a letter written in 1741 Shenstone became the first person to record the use of "floccinaucinihilipilification". In the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary this was recognized as the longest word in the English language.
External links
1714 births | 1786 deaths | English poets | English gardeners
"William Shenstone"