Benjamin Franklin King Jr., known almost everywhere in print as Ben King, was born on 17 March 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and died on 8 April 1894 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His life lasted only thirty-seven years, and his reputation has never approached that of the best-known American poets of his generation. Yet King was far from insignificant in his own day. He belonged to the large, lively, and now too often…
“If I should die to-night, and you should come to my cold corpse and say, weeping and longing, I would not care.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Despair
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“Don't be disturbed if you don't know much what prosody is. Hardly anyone does.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder
