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…
“Each poet will make a record different from that of any of his fellows, and yet the record of each will be true.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“I don't think I am a falcon. I think I am a life with a broken wing. I know it. But read that poem—Let no charitable hope. Now you know, red lizard.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Irony, Joy
