Артур О’Шоунесси: Поэт, герпетолог и предвестник декаданса

British poet and herpetologist

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (14 March 184430 January 1881) was a British poet and herpetologist. 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 (as The Music Makers), Zoltán Kodály, Alfred Reed and, more recently, 808 State (ex:el: nephatiti) and Aphex Twin (Selected Ambient Works 85 92).

In June 1861, at age 17, Arthur O'Shaughnessy received the post of transcriber in the library of the British Museum, 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 reptiles, and after his death, he was honoured in the specific name, oshaughnessyi, of four new species of lizards described by Albert Günther and George Albert Boulenger.

The artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti 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.

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". O'Shaughnessy is commemorated in the scientific names of four species of lizards: Calumma oshaughnessyi, Cercosaura oshaughnessyi, Enyalioides oshaughnessyi, and Pachydactylus oshaughnessyi.