Ada Cambridge, who would become one of colonial Australia's most prolific and quietly subversive literary voices, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England. She was the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer of comfortable means. The Norfolk countryside, with its flat, expansive skies and ancient, weathered churches, would seep into her imagination and later resurface in…
“At any rate the religious faith of the fifties as to which we were all children, young and old alike, it had one precious quality that it seems never likely to have again—it sufficed.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“I have always felt that poetry should be written with a clear, concise focus, capturing a single vivid image or thought without unnecessary adornment.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder
