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…
“The cynics are wrong who see in our future no place for an art which belongs, they say, to the childhood of the race.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
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…
“To transform history into art is surely not a sin.”
Neighbourhood:
Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
