Which ancient city in the Middle East did poet John William Burgon describe as 'a rose-red city half as old as time'?
John Burgon In 1845 Burgon won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Petra", with topic Petra, the city now Jordan, which he had never seen. An excerpt describing the buildings has often been reprinted: The poem is now chiefly remembered for the famous final line above, which quotes the phrase "half as old as time" from Samuel Rogers. (This fourteen-line excerpt is often referred to as a "sonnet," but the poem is 370 lines long, in rhymed couplets. Burgon published it, apparently in a small pamphlet, around 1845. A "Second Edition" "To Which a Few Short Poems Are Now Added," was published
Poet as legislator "must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind" – a fully public, even patriotic role moreover By contrast the Romantic view of the poet as "unackowledged" legislator emerges at the turm of the century in the writing of William Godwin, with his anarchic view of the poet as "the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world". It received its most memorable formulation however in Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1820 "A Defence of Poetry". Shelley maintained that, through their powers of imaginative understanding, 'Poets' (in the widest sense, of ancient Greece) were able to identify