Dorothy Wordsworth was born on 25 December 1771 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the English Lake District, and died on 25 January 1855 at Rydal Mount, Westmorland. For much of the nineteenth century, she was remembered chiefly as the devoted sister and household companion of William Wordsworth, the poet whose name became central to English Romanticism. Modern readers, however, increasingly encounter her as a writer of…
“I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow
Achsa White Sprague was born on 17 November 1827 in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a small mountain community whose austere beauty and close social fabric helped form her imagination. She died there on 6 July 1862, only thirty-four years old by the modern method of counting age, though many nineteenth-century notices described her as being in her thirty-fifth year. In the short interval between those dates, Sprague became…
“I am not afraid to die, for death to me is but the threshold of a higher, purer, and more glorious life.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
