In a modest house on Wilson Street in Perth, Scotland, a small attic room served as both prison and sanctuary for one of Scotland's most remarkable twentieth-century poets. From this confined space, William Soutar would pen some of the most enduring children's verse in Scots literature while simultaneously crafting deeply personal meditations on mortality, isolation, and the human condition. His story is one of extra…
“The loveliness of earth had become quintessential in women; as if in them were now summated those other sensations which quicken the whole being.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Peace
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“If it's chronic tuberculosis, why that's what it is, and I'm just going to go ahead, find a way of living that's as little invalidish as possible, get what I can out of things and let it go at that.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder
