Landor, Walter Savage 1775-1864
English writer

Born in Warwick, he was expelled from Rugby and Trinity College, Oxford, and spent a large part of his life in France and Italy. Gebir (1798), a poem showing the influence of Milton and Pindar, was the occasion of his lifelong friendship with Robert Southey, but it was a failure. He wrote other poems and plays, and his best-known work is Imaginary Conversations (2 vols, 1824-29), a collection of prose dialogues. He wrote the Examination of Shakespeare (1834), then quarrelled with his wife and moved to Bath, England, where he wrote Pericles and Aspasia (1836), Pentameron (1837), Hellenics (1847) and Poemata et Inscriptiones (1847). In 1858 an unhappy scandal (see his Dry Sticks Fagoted by Landor, 1858), involving a libel action, drove him back to Italy and he lived in Florence until his death.

Bibliography: R H Super, Landor, a biography (1954)