About Thomas Hood
Thomas Hood, (London, May 23, 1799 — St. John's Wood, London, May 3, 1845) was an English poet and humorist. The son of a publisher of Scottish origin, He studied engraving and ran the “London Magazine” in parallel. His literary style and tastes can be divided into various creative periods: in the first, at the beginning of his career, Hood anticipated some elements of late Romanticism and Decadentism, drawing inspiration from the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and especially John Keats, favoring the cult of beauty in his poetry. In a second period, Hood achieved a more successful poetic dimension, approaching humor and mock-heroic lyrics, distinguishing himself for his lively and witty ideas, as in his narrative poem “Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg”, which was first published from 1840 to 1841, and with which he achieved public and critical success. The plot of the poem highlighted Hood's thought and taste for humor, and in fact the purpose of the work is to ironize on the usefulness and importance of certain worldly values, such as power and wealth. Hood also wrote poems of commitment and social denunciation, such as “Song of the Shirt” (1843), “Odes and Addresses to Great People” (1825), and “Whims and Oddities” (1826 and 1827), with which he achieved great fame.Due to a precarious financial situation and numerous health problems, he died on May 3, 1845. Thomas Hood was especially appreciated for his comic and satirical verses, made of puns and misunderstandings. However, the moving and profound rhymes he wrote before he died remain today among his masterpieces like “The Bridge of Sighs” (1844). It is from this last poem that came the famous sentence “Any where out of the world”, quoted by Poe in “The Poetic Principle” and taken as the title of one of Baudelaire's prose poems, who translated into french “The Bridge of Sighs” in April 1865.
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No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!
