Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in a modest farmhouse in West Hills, on Long Island, New York, into a working-class family that embodied the restless energy and struggles of early America. He was the second of nine children born to Walter Whitman, a carpenter and farmer of English descent who wrestled with financial instability, and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, whose Dutch heritage brought a touch of earthy prac…
“Perhaps the inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, &c., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
Max Ehrmann was born on 26 September 1872 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died there on 9 September 1945, seventeen days before his seventy-third birthday. He is remembered almost everywhere as the author of “Desiderata,” the compact prose poem beginning, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” but that single work represents only the most widely circulated part of a long, earnest, and sometimes overlooked literary life…
“Education is largely the acquisition of the accumulated prejudices of man’s past—often a serious handicap for the influencing of man’s future.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace
