Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…
“I do not seek Wealth, Fame or Place, among the great ones of my race, but I would pen in letters bold some thoughts perhaps to cheer the soul.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
Alice Meynell, born Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson on 11 October 1847 and dead on 27 November 1922, was one of the most distinctive English writers to work across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. A poet of exquisite compression, an essayist of alert and sensuous intelligence, a critic, editor, Catholic public intellectual, and campaigner for women’s suffrage, she made a literary identity that cannot be r…
“The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness
