In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“He speaks our language better than we do merely because he is more skilful with it than we are; his skill is part of our skill, his power of our power.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Alan Seeger was born in New York City on 22 June 1888, into an American family whose comfort, education, and international connections gave him unusual freedom while also placing before him the question of what a privileged young man ought to do with his life. He died on 4 July 1916, age twenty-eight, in the Battle of the Somme while serving in the French Foreign Legion. In the years between those dates he became, in…
“I have always been a fatalist.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
