Arthur Davison Ficke was born in Davenport, Iowa, on 10 November 1883, at a moment when the United States was rapidly becoming both an industrial power and a more self-conscious literary nation. He died on 30 November 1945, at the age of sixty-two, leaving a body of poetry that can seem difficult to classify neatly. He was at once a disciplined maker of sonnets, a cosmopolitan traveler, a student of Asian cultures, a…
“Poetry is the attempt of a human soul to make its lonely music audible to others.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Sorrow, Wonder
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“It belongs to anyone. It is of all the arts the closest to a man.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality