Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…
“It was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Irony
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, then a bustling coastal town in Massachusetts, and died on 24 March 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his lifetime he became, by a considerable margin, the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century. His verses were memorized in schools, recited in parlors, printed in newspapers, sung, parodied, and carried across the Atlantic…
“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder
