Arthur O'Shaughnessy

• Name — Arthur O'Shaughnessy • Birthplace — London, England • Born — 14 March 1844 • Died — 30 January 1881 • Place of death — London, England • Children — 2

• Illustration — J. T. Nettleship's illustration to O'Shaughnessy's poem "A Neglected Harp" in Epic of Women (1870) In June 1861, at age 17, Arthur O'Shaughnessy received the post of transcriber in the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. According to Sir Edmund Gosse, O'Shaughnessy was one of Bulwer Lytton's many children born out of wedlock. Two years later, he became a herpetologist in the museum's zoological department. From 1874 to his premature death, he described six new species of reptiles, and after his death, he was honoured in the specific name, oshaughnessyi, of four new species of lizards described by Albert Günther and George Albert Boulenger.

However, O'Shaughnessy's true passion was for literature. He published his first collection of poetry, Epic of Women, in 1870, followed two years later by Lays of France in 1872, and then Music and Moonlight in 1874. He is now best remembered for the first poem in his collection Music and Moonlight, entitled "Ode", which begins with the words: "We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams". O'Shaughnessy's most quoted poem is his ode to the place of art, beginning We are the music-makers. And we are the dreamers of dreams. Wandering by lone sea-breakers. And sitting by desolate streams; World-losers and world-forsakers. On whom the pale moon gleams Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems When he was 30, he married and did not produce any more volumes of poetry for the last seven years of his life. His last volume, Songs of a Worker, was published posthumously in 1881. O'Shaughnessy was both formally and aesthetically cutting-edge. For example, he is one of the few Pre-Raphaelite poets to have needed a steady income, and his corpus often explores the relationship between art and work. Unlike other Pre-Raphaelites, O'Shaughnessy saw poetry as the result of toil rather than the consequence of a moment's frenetic inspiration. In his influential 1957 essay, T. S. Eliot gives O'Shaughnessy as an example of "poets who have written just one, or only a few good poems," and says that, despite his uneven output, "We Are the Music Makers" belongs in any 19th century verse anthology.

The artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were among O'Shaughnessy's circle of friends, and in 1873, he married Eleanor Marston, the daughter of author John Westland Marston and the sister of the poet Philip Bourke Marston. Together, he and his wife wrote a book of children's stories, Toy-land (1875). They had two children together, both of whom died in infancy. Eleanor died in 1879, and O'Shaughnessy himself died in London two years later at the age of 36 from the effects of a "chill" after walking home from the theatre on a rainy night. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

• An Epic of Women (1870) • Lays of France (1872) • Music and Moonlight: Poems and Songs (1874) • Toy-land (with Eleanor W. O'Shaughnessy) (1875) • Songs of a Worker (1881) (published posthumously)