Arthur Macy (June 6, 1842 – June 1, 1904) emerged as a distinctive voice in 19th-century American poetry, blending Quaker sensibility with a soldier’s grit and a businessman’s pragmatism. Born on Nantucket Island to Oliver C. Macy and Phebe Fowler Macy, descendants of Thomas Macy—the Quaker leader who famously purchased Nantucket from Indigenous tribes—Arthur’s early life was steeped in New England’s maritime culture…
“All right, but that is not Poetry with a big P, and that is the only kind that should be published. And there is mighty little of it.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Irony
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…
“A man's character is his fate.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder