Stephen Crane, born 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, and dead of tuberculosis on 5 June 1900 in Badenweiler, Germany, lived only twenty-eight years, yet his work altered the direction of American fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is commonly placed among the major writers of literary naturalism, beside such figures as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, but the label only partly contains him. Crane was at once…
“I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
In the fading light of Victorian England, when the certainties of empire began to crack and a fin-de-siècle weariness settled over the literary world, Ernest Christopher Dowson emerged as one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices of his generation. His brief, tragic life—spanning a mere thirty-two years from 1867 to 1900—produced poetry of such delicate melancholy and exquisite craftsmanship that it continues to ca…
“The subtilty, the tact of omission, the morbidezza! My Last Duchess, par exemple, is pure Henry James. I must have read it a dozen times before to-day: but I have only just appreciated the full subtilty of it. It is wonderful.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
