Barry Cornwall Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Bryan Waller Procter, who wrote as Barry Cornwall, was born on 21 November 1787 in Leeds, Yorkshire, into the expanding professional middle class of late Georgian England. His early years coincided with a nation reshaped by war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, accelerating industry, and widening literacy - conditions that made poetry both a public art and a market commodity. Leeds, vigorous and commercial, offered him less of the rural dreamscape of Romantic verse than a close view of urban ambition and the anxieties of advancement.

The young Procter developed a private temperament suited to observation: sociable enough to move easily among artists and writers later on, but inwardly governed by reticence and taste. The adoption of a pen name was not mere fashion. It signaled a controlled division between the respectable identity required for a legal career and the more vulnerable self that wrote lyric tenderness, longing, and meditations on time. That doubleness - public duty and private music - would remain the most persistent fact of his inner life.

Education and Formative Influences
He was educated at Leeds Grammar School and trained for the law, eventually entering the Inner Temple in London, where he absorbed the citys literary networks as readily as its professional disciplines. The London of his youth was a crucible of Romantic aftershocks: Wordsworth and Coleridge had redefined the moral uses of lyric; Byron and Moore had popularized a more musical, worldly mode; and the theater and periodical press were shaping taste at speed. Procters formative influences were thus double-edged - the inward seriousness of the Romantics and the performative elegance demanded by salons, dinners, and journals.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Procter published early volumes under the name Barry Cornwall and became known for songs, dramatic sketches, and lyrically polished poems that suited the drawing room as well as the page; his collections and his later literary labors, including editorial work and biographical writing (notably on Edmund Kean and Charles Lamb), positioned him as a mediator of the era rather than a revolutionary within it. In parallel he pursued a steady legal trajectory, culminating in a long civil-service appointment as a Commissioner in Bankruptcy, a role that anchored him financially while constraining time and risk. A major turning point was the consolidation of his friendships in the London literary world - Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and other figures of the metropolitan Romantic circle - relationships that sharpened his ear for conversational grace and deepened his loyalty to a humane, sympathetic literature even as Victorian taste shifted toward different moral and narrative ambitions.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Cornwalls poems favor the lucid melody of song over the fractured sublimity of high Romanticism. He wrote as if the finest work of the imagination was to make feeling inhabitable - to craft an atmosphere in which affection, regret, and wonder could be safely experienced. His recurrent subject is not heroic action but emotional management: the attempt to keep love from turning into possession, grief from turning into spectacle, and time from turning into panic. That ethical restraint appears in the line, "Half the ills we heard within our hearts are ills because we hoard them". The psychology behind it is revealing: he treats suffering less as fate than as a habit of secrecy, suggesting a man acquainted with inward pressure and convinced that tenderness, spoken plainly, is a form of prevention.

Time, for Cornwall, is not merely an external clock but an intimate force that touches the nerves. His work repeatedly asks for gentleness from the world and from memory, as in, "Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide adown thy stream, Gently, - as we sometimes glide Through a quiet dream!" The plea implies a temperament sensitive to change and wary of the brutal accelerations of modern life; it also hints at the discipline of someone who kept two lives running in parallel and wanted the passage between them to be smooth. Even his darker reflections compress metaphysics into a single psychological axiom: "Death is the tyrant of the imagination". Here mortality is less a theological event than a mental despot, governing what the mind dares to picture - a view consistent with a poet whose elegance often masks a fierce fear of inner disorder.

Legacy and Influence
Barry Cornwall endured as a representative voice of the English lyric between high Romanticism and the Victorian period - not a canonical engine of innovation, but a craftsman of song whose best lines kept their place in anthologies and in the memory of readers who valued musical clarity and emotional tact. His biographical and editorial work also helped shape how contemporaries such as Kean and Lamb were remembered, making him an important secondary architect of Romantic-era reputation. In the long view, his influence is felt less through direct imitation than through the model he embodied: the professional man of letters who preserved a private, chastened lyric self within the demands of public work, and who treated feeling not as a spectacle but as a moral practice.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Barry, under the main topics: Friendship - Poetry - Mortality - Letting Go - Time.

• 1832 English Songs and Other Small Poems (Book)
• 1824 Effigies Poeticae (Book)
• 1823 The Flood of Thessaly (Poem)
• 1821 Mirandola (Play)
• 1820 Marcian Colonna (Poem)
• 1820 A Sicilian Story (Novellas)
• 1819 Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems (Book)

• Wikipedia