In the sun-dappled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings entered the world with a quiet promise of rebellion that would one day shatter the conventions of American poetry. Known to family and friends simply as Estlin, and to the world as E.E. Cummings—or, in the lowercase stylings that publishers later adopted for his name—he would become one of the twentieth century’s most…
“The artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality
Hart Crane’s life was a blaze of incandescent vision cut short by the very torments that fueled his art. Born Harold Hart Crane on July 21, 1899, in the quiet village of Garrettsville, Ohio, he arrived into a world already humming with the industrial promise that would later become the spine of his poetry. His father, Clarence A. Crane, was a shrewd and ambitious candy manufacturer who would one day invent the Life S…
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality
