Clement Clarke Moore was born in New York City on 15 July 1779, into a family whose standing joined religious authority, learning, landholding, and old New York connections. He died on 10 July 1863, five days before his eighty-fourth birthday, having become a respected scholar, educator, churchman, landowner, and local civic figure. Yet history has remembered him overwhelmingly for a poem of fifty-six lines: “A Visit…
“In spite of all the cares and sorrows of this life, he thinks we are so constituted that a good honest hearty laugh, which conceals no malice, and is excited by nothing corrupt, however ungenteel it may be, is healthful both to body and mind.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness
Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political aspirant, a man of forceful opinions, Southern sympathies, and unstable prospects. His mother, Isabelle Mood…
“Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
