Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, then a bustling coastal town in Massachusetts, and died on 24 March 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his lifetime he became, by a considerable margin, the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century. His verses were memorized in schools, recited in parlors, printed in newspapers, sung, parodied, and carried across the Atlantic…
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder
In the sun-dappled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings entered the world with a quiet promise of rebellion that would one day shatter the conventions of American poetry. Known to family and friends simply as Estlin, and to the world as E.E. Cummings—or, in the lowercase stylings that publishers later adopted for his name—he would become one of the twentieth century’s most…
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality