In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“It is my object in the present discussion to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder
Catherine Marthe Louise Pozzi remains one of the most enigmatic and haunting figures in French poetry, a writer who distilled an entire spiritual autobiography into just six extraordinary poems while living a life marked by privilege, passion, illness, and relentless intellectual pursuit. Born on July 13, 1882, into the glittering aristocratic and bourgeois milieu of fin-de-siècle Paris, and dying on December 3, 1934…
“Je ne veux pas être heureuse, je veux être entière.”
Neighbourhood:
French Symbolists, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
