In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which lies in the delight of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
In the sunlit streets of late-19th-century Chicago, where the Great Lakes breezes carried the promise of industry and the distant echoes of Southern migrations, Fenton Johnson entered the world on May 7, 1888. He would leave it on September 17, 1958, in the same city that had cradled his ambitions and tested his spirit, his seventy years a testament to the restless genius of an artist who refused to be confined by th…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Peace