Biography Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

Poet Biography

O'Shaughnessy was born on May 14, 1844 in London, England. At the age of seventeen he received the post of transcriber in the library of the British Museum. Two years later at the age of nineteen he was appointed to be an assistant in the natural history department, where he specialized in icthyology. However, his true passion was for literature. He published his Epic of Women in 1870, his first collection. He printed three collections of poetry between 1870 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 after his death the same year.