Katharine Lee Bates was born on 12 August 1859 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and died on 28 March 1929 in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her name is permanently associated with “America the Beautiful,” one of the most familiar and resonant poems in United States culture. Yet the anthem has sometimes obscured the range of the woman who wrote it. Bates was not simply a patriotic versifier who happened to find a m…
“Where the narrative is highly colored by emotion, the ballad merges into the lyric. It is difficult here to draw the line of distinction.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on 27 June 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, and died there on 9 February 1906, only thirty-three years later. In that brief life he became one of the most accomplished and consequential American writers of his generation: a poet of extraordinary musical discipline, a novelist and short-story writer, a public reader, a lyricist, and, in many ways, the first African American author to achieve a broad…
“It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
