Achsa White Sprague was born on 17 November 1827 in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a small mountain community whose austere beauty and close social fabric helped form her imagination. She died there on 6 July 1862, only thirty-four years old by the modern method of counting age, though many nineteenth-century notices described her as being in her thirty-fifth year. In the short interval between those dates, Sprague became…
“I have no desire to live merely for the sake of living, but I do desire to live to do good, to be useful to my fellow beings.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Thomas Hood was born in London on 23 May 1799 and died there on 3 May 1845, only twenty days short of his forty-sixth birthday. He occupies a distinctive, sometimes deceptively difficult place in English literary history. To generations of readers he has been the author of jokes, puns, comic ballads, and apparently effortless verbal absurdities; to others he is the compassionate author of “The Song of the Shirt” and…
“I have never had a day's health in my life, but I have had several days of illness.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
