Carl Sandburg, born 6 January 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, and dead 22 July 1967 in Flat Rock, North Carolina, became one of the most recognizable American writers of the twentieth century: a poet of factories and prairies, a journalist of civic life, a collector and performer of folk songs, a novelist and children’s writer, and the immensely popular biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Few writers worked so deliberately t…
“Life is like an onion; you peel off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in a modest farmhouse in West Hills, on Long Island, New York, into a working-class family that embodied the restless energy and struggles of early America. He was the second of nine children born to Walter Whitman, a carpenter and farmer of English descent who wrestled with financial instability, and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, whose Dutch heritage brought a touch of earthy prac…
“But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing