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…
“She did not mind harrowing my infant soul with fore-knowledge of the world's agonies, and I do not know that she was wrong.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Leonard Bacon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, translator, and critic, was a figure whose life and work embodied the enduring power of traditional verse to illuminate the absurdities, adventures, and quiet profundities of the human condition. Born at the close of the nineteenth century and passing in the middle of the tumultuous twentieth, he navigated an era of literary upheaval with a steadfast commitment…
“I knew I wanted to write poetry and nothing but poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
