Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…
“One's nature no longer radiates freely from its own centre; the centre itself is shifted, is put outside one's self.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Ernst Stadler was born on 11 August 1883 in Colmar, in Alsace, and was killed on 30 October 1914 near Zandvoorde in Flanders during the First World War. His life lasted little more than thirty-one years, and the body of poetry on which his reputation rests is correspondingly small. Yet his importance in German-language literature is out of proportion to its size. Stadler stands among the decisive early voices of Expr…
“But the younger generation, further removed from memories of war and less inclined to uncompromising partisanship, turns the old hardship into a new virtue and seeks to embrace both elements within itself, with the ideal of a future synthesis always before it.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, German Romantics
Emotional landscape: Longing, Fear, Sensuality