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…
“I am convinced that there is scarcely a creature living which does not prove itself possessed of quite human intelligence as soon as one begins to make a friend of it.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…
“Every line and verse in this little volume has been composed and written with my own hand notwithstanding the loss of my eyesight.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
