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…
“Yes; that’s it; we can see it all now,—the Fleet Prison with Goldsmith, Johnson, and all the rest of the old masters in a bunch!”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Irony
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“It is this vagueness of thought endeavoring to sound the foundation of all things, this want of definition, hinting at ideas that cannot be precisely expressed, that give to art its ultimate and finest significance.”
Neighbourhood:
Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
