Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on 27 June 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, and died there on 9 February 1906, only thirty-three years later. In that brief life he became one of the most accomplished and consequential American writers of his generation: a poet of extraordinary musical discipline, a novelist and short-story writer, a public reader, a lyricist, and, in many ways, the first African American author to achieve a broad…
“I have never been able to determine whether I am a poet who writes prose or a prose writer who writes poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, and died on 10 November 1891 in Marseille. Few writers have produced so small a body of work and so immense a legend. Rimbaud wrote nearly all the poetry for which he is remembered between his mid-teens and about twenty, then turned away from literature with an apparent decisiveness that has fascinat…
“You are a teacher again. You told me that one owes a duty to Society; you are part of the teaching profession: you are keeping to the beaten track.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace