On January 25, 1876, in the quiet town of Plainfield, New Jersey, William Ellery Channing Leonard was born into a world of literary aspiration and transcendentalist idealism. His parents, fervent admirers of the New England intellectual tradition, named their only child after William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister who had mentored Ralph Waldo Emerson. This choice of name proved prophetic, for Leonard would s…
“We are human from the start. We do not need to see a man die to know death. Death is born with our birth.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
The story of George Cabot Lodge is a story of two shadows: one cast by the immense, looming silhouette of a politically titanic father, and the other, the long, penumbral shadow of a premature and tragic end. Within the brief span of thirty-six years, Lodge crafted a body of work that was unapologetically intellectual, earnestly philosophical, and deeply romantic, seeking nothing less than to articulate the soul’s st…
“This winter I have been realizing a copy-book commonplace, which is at the same time a metaphysical profundity, viz.: that the present is all that is and it is not. One of the crowning metaphysical paradoxes. Of course the present is not. While you are uttering now, it is fled — it never existed.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness
