author
Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy
1844–1881
Best remembered for the stirring line “We are the music makers,” this Victorian poet paired dreamy, musical verse with a day job in science at the British Museum. His work still stands out for its mix of imagination, melancholy, and wonder.
1 Audiobook
An Epic of Women, and Other Poems
by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy
About the author
Born in London in 1844, Arthur O'Shaughnessy was a British poet of Irish descent whose writing became closely associated with the later Victorian love of rich, musical language and fantasy. He is most widely remembered for “Ode” from Music and Moonlight (1874), the poem that begins with the famous words “We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams.”
O'Shaughnessy began working at the British Museum while still young, first in the library and later in the zoological department, where he developed expertise in reptiles and amphibians. That unusual combination of poet and museum scientist gives his life a distinctive shape: by day he worked with specimens and scholarship, while his literary reputation grew through several volumes of verse.
He published multiple poetry collections before his death in London in 1881 at just 36 years old. Though much of his work is less widely read now than it once was, his best-known poem has endured for generations, keeping his name alive as a poet of vision, beauty, and artistic ambition.