To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…
“The snail — I interpose a space between him and your poems! — soothes and solaces my taste.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
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…
“Poetry continues to be my blessing and my curse.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality