Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (14 March 184430 January 1881) was a British poet and
herpetologist.
Of Irish descent, he was born in London.
He is most remembered for his poem "
Ode", from his 1874 collection ''Music and Moonlight'', which begins with the words "We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams", and which has been set to music by several composers including
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestr ...
(as ''
The Music Makers)'',
Zoltán Kodály
Zoltán Kodály (, ; , ; 16 December 1882 – 6 March 1967) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, music pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of the Kodály method of music education.
...
,
Alfred Reed and, more recently,
808 State (
ex:el: nephatiti) and
Aphex Twin
Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), known professionally as Aphex Twin, is a British musician, composer and DJ active in electronic music since 1988. His idiosyncratic work has drawn on many styles, including techno, ambient music, ambi ...
(''
Selected Ambient Works 85-92'').
Early life and herpetology

In June 1861, at age 17, Arthur O'Shaughnessy received the post of transcriber in the library of the
British Museum
The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...
, 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
reptile
Reptiles, as commonly defined, are a group of tetrapods with an ectothermic metabolism and Amniotic egg, amniotic development. Living traditional reptiles comprise four Order (biology), orders: Testudines, Crocodilia, Squamata, and Rhynchocepha ...
s, and after his death, he was honoured in the
specific name, ''oshaughnessyi'', of four new species of
lizards described by
Albert Günther
Albert Karl Ludwig Gotthilf Günther , also Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther (3October 18301February 1914), was a German-born British zoologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. Günther is ranked the second-most productive reptile tax ...
and
George Albert Boulenger
George Albert Boulenger (19 October 1858 – 23 November 1937) was a Belgian-British zoologist who described and gave scientific names to over 2,000 new animal species, chiefly fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Boulenger was also an active botani ...
.
[ Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . (O'Shaughnessy, p. 197).]
Poetry
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.
Personal life
The artists
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( ; ), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brother ...
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.
Legacy
The anthologist
Francis Turner Palgrave, in his work, ''
The Golden Treasury'' declared that of the modern poets, despite his limited output, O'Shaughnessy had a gift that in some ways was second only to
Tennyson and "a haunting music all his own".
O'Shaughnessy's translations of
Parnassian poetry, and the influence of French
decadence on his own work, were crucial in setting the stage for English-language decadence in the 1890s. Jordan Kistler writes that he was "instrumental in bridging the gap between the Pre-Raphaelitism practised by poets such as D. G. Rossetti and William Morris in the 1870s and the aestheticism of the 1890s".
[Kistler, Jordan (2016). ''Arthur O'Shaughnessy, a Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum''. p. 140.]
O'Shaughnessy is commemorated in the scientific names of four species of lizards: ''
Calumma oshaughnessyi'', ''
Cercosaura oshaughnessyi'', ''
Enyalioides oshaughnessyi'', and ''
Pachydactylus oshaughnessyi''.
Works
*''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)
Sources
*''Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Music Maker'' by Molly Whittington-Egan (2013) Bluecoat Press
*''Arthur O'Shaughnessy, a Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum'' by Jordan Kistler (2016) Routledge
References
External links
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*
*
List of O'Shaughnessy papers held at Queen's University Belfast
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oshaughnessy, Arthur
1844 births
1881 deaths
British male poets
19th-century British poets
19th-century British male writers
British herpetologists