In the early decades of the twentieth century, when American poetry was struggling to break free from the strictures of Victorian convention, a slight, chess-obsessed son of German immigrants emerged as one of the most influential figures in literary modernism. Alfred Kreymborg, born on December 10, 1883, in New York City, would become far more than a poet. He was a literary impresario, a talent scout with an uncanny…
“We have to learn to live with one another, or we shall cease to live at all.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Maxwell Bodenheim's life reads like one of his own feverish poems—raw, defiant, laced with startling imagery, and shadowed by a restless hunger for freedom that both illuminated and destroyed him. Born into the humid anonymity of a small Southern town, he rose to become the self-crowned King of Greenwich Village bohemians during the glittering, gin-soaked Jazz Age, only to tumble into poverty, ridicule, and a violent…
“Poetry takes on the guise of a multi-colored, naively wise, innocently searching child trying to survive in the ugly and inane uproar created by prosaic adults.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
