Imaginary Conversations and Poems

Drawn from the vast series Landor built between 1824 and 1829, this selection gathers his prose dialogues alongside a sampling of his verse. In the conversations, figures from history and legend meet on the page: statesmen, poets, philosophers, monarchs, and their courtiers speak with one another about ethics, politics, taste, and the uses of power. Landor cared less about documentary accuracy than about imaginative truth, the distilled temper of a particular mind or age caught in poised, sharply cut exchange. The poems, terse and classical in feeling, round out the picture of his art. These dialogues brought him his widest readership and remained his most admired achievement during his lifetime, prized for their formal control and epigrammatic edge.