Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“If a metaphor is used, it is a metaphor directly relating to the theme, not something borrowed from the ends of the earth.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Constantine Peter Cavafy, universally known as C. P. Cavafy, was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, on 29 April 1863, and died there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. The coincidence has naturally encouraged a Cavafian reading of his life: a date returning with a measured inevitability, an ending that seems to complete a private design. Yet Cavafy’s achievement was anything but neat or pr…
“I am a poet of old age.”
Neighbourhood:
Greek Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
