In the last week of December 1898, an aging schoolteacher in California completed a poem that would transform American literature and launch a national debate about labor, justice, and the human cost of industrial progress. Within weeks, Edwin Markham's "The Man with the Hoe" catapulted him from obscurity to international fame, earning him recognition as the "Dean of American Poetry" and the "Laureate of Labor." His…
“We are blind until we see that in the human plan nothing is worth the making if it does not make the man.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
John Gillespie Magee Jr., born in Shanghai, China, on 9 June 1922 and killed over Lincolnshire, England, on 11 December 1941, occupies an unusual and enduring place in twentieth-century literature. He is remembered above all for “High Flight,” the fourteen-line poem that begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” and ends with one of the most quoted conclusions in English poetry: “Put out my hand, and tou…
“It was written in about twenty minutes.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Georgian Poets, Hymn Writers
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Spirituality
