Arthur O'Shaughnessy

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Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (March 14, 1844–January 30, 1881) was a British poet, born in London.

At the age of seventeen, in June 1861, he received the post of transcriber in the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. Two years later, at the age of nineteen, he became an assistant in the natural history department, where he specialized in Ichthyology. However, his true passion was for literature. He published his first collection, Epic of Women, in 1870. He published two more collections of poetry, in 1872 and 1874. When he was thirty he married and did not print 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's poetry was relatively unknown in his own era, but its popularity has grown substantially in the 20th century. O'Shaughnessy has been associated with the rise of decadence.

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Ode (O'Shaughnessy)

By far the most noted of any his works are the initial lines of the "Ode" from his book Music and Moonlight (1874):

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.

Many people to whom it is familiar believe that the poem is only three stanzas long; but in fact it actually consists of nine stanzas.

This "Ode" has been set to music by Edward Elgar in his "Opus 69", and also by Zoltán Kodály.

One of the most popular media the poem has appeared in is in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.
Willy Wonka: "The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries."
Veruca Salt: "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?"
Willy Wonka: "We are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of dreams."

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 sister of the poet Philip Bourke Marston. Together, he and his wife wrote a book of children's stories titled 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 from the effects of a "chill".

The opening stanzas of his "Ode" have inspired many people and have been admired by many poets, including W. B. Yeats. He was also alluded to by Neil Gaiman in his extremely popular series The Sandman in the guise of the envoy of the The Endless (comics), Eblis O'Shaughnessy. 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 in some ways second only to Tennyson, and "a haunting music all his own".