On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…
“My own muddles are written over the earth and heaven, but I take refuge in God and the Order, and hope, under the Mercy, to smile at them all in the end.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy
In the sun-dappled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings entered the world with a quiet promise of rebellion that would one day shatter the conventions of American poetry. Known to family and friends simply as Estlin, and to the world as E.E. Cummings—or, in the lowercase stylings that publishers later adopted for his name—he would become one of the twentieth century’s most…
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Sensuality, Longing
