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…
“A poem springs from emotions produced by an actual experience, or, almost as forcefully, from those produced by an imaginary experience.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
Charlotte Mew, born Charlotte Mary Mew on 15 November 1869 and dead on 24 March 1928, occupies a singular and often haunting position in English poetry. She was admired in her own lifetime by writers as different as Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ezra Pound, yet her name later slipped from general literary view before being powerfully recovered by feminist, queer, and modernis…
“Not only the cry but the gesture and the accent—and so one goes on—calling up witnesses to the real thing!”
Neighbourhood:
Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow