Landor, Walter Savage, 1775–1864, English poet and essayist, educated at Oxford. After a quarrel with his father, he went to live in Wales, where he wrote the epic poem Gebir (1798). The middle and most productive years of his life were spent in Italy. There he wrote the greater portion of his voluminous prose work Imaginary Conversations (1824–53), consisting of nearly 150 dialogues between notables both ancient and modern. Landor's verse ranges from the epic to the epigrammatic, including many lyrics of great simplicity and intensity. His other works include Pericles and Aspasia (1836), Hellenics (1847), and Heroic Idylls (1863).
See his complete works (ed. by T. E. Welby and S. Wheeler, 16 vol., 1927–36); biography by M. Elwin (1970); bibliography by R. H. Super (1954).
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