Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died there on 29 January 1933. During her lifetime she became one of the best-known American lyric poets of the early twentieth century, admired for verse that appeared effortless: brief, melodious, emotionally direct, and exquisitely shaped. Her poems spoke of love, solitude, desire, beauty, loss, the changing seasons, and death. Their clarity made…
“If each poet will try to get himself down in black and white as concisely and honestly as he can, every kind of reaction to beauty and pain will finally be recorded.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
Leslie Pinckney Hill entered the world on May 14, 1880, in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of Samuel H. Hill, a man who had known the brutal chains of enslavement, and Sarah E. Hill. In the shadow of the post-Reconstruction South, where the promises of freedom still clashed with the realities of Jim Crow oppression, young Leslie’s early years were steeped in the rhythms of a family striving for dignity and self-determin…
“If civilization preserves the whole past record of the race in literature, art, trade, war and peace, culture is concerned with the values of that record to human betterment.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Tenderness