In the pantheon of Irish literature, few figures are as tragically compelling or as artistically brilliant as James Clarence Mangan. Born into poverty and dying in destitution, Mangan lived a life that reads like one of his own melancholic verses—filled with promise, haunted by despair, and ultimately cut short by the very demons that fueled his extraordinary creativity. His brief forty-six years on earth produced so…
“Hurricanes are most inclined to prostrate mud hovels: they can only rage impotently around the pyramid whose apex kisses heaven.”
Neighbourhood:
Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who wrote under the enduringly cheerful name Susan Coolidge, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 29 January 1835, and died in Newport, Rhode Island, on 9 April 1905. She occupies a central place in the history of American children’s literature, though her reputation has often rested too narrowly on a single title: What Katy Did (1872). That novel and its sequels made her one of the best-known writ…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Children's Verse, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
