Edwin Arnold
1832 CE–1904 CE · Modern · Gravesend, Kent
June 10, 1832 – March 24, 1904
Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) was an English poet and journalist whose 1879 narrative poem The Light of Asia presented the life and teaching of the Buddha to a wide Western readership. Hugely popular in Britain and America, the poem did much to stimulate sympathetic Western interest in Buddhism, though it is a literary and devotional retelling shaped by Victorian sensibilities rather than a scholarly or doctrinal account. Arnold was a poet and populariser, not a practitioner or teacher within any Buddhist tradition. He died in 1904.
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Gravesend, Kent
What they did here
DOCUMENTED: born in 1832; educated at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.
About Gravesend, Kent
Gravesend, in Kent, England, was the birthplace, in 1832, of Sir Edwin Arnold, the poet and journalist whose epic poem 'The Light of Asia' (1879) presented the life and teaching of the Buddha to a wide Victorian readership and helped shape Western interest in Buddhism.
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