Lizette Woodworth Reese was born on 9 January 1856 in the Greenspring Valley area of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on 17 December 1935. Her long life joined two very different literary ages. She was formed by the cadences, moral seriousness, and cultivated sentiment of nineteenth-century verse, yet some of her finest poems possess the compression, pictorial clarity, and emotional reserve that late…
“For poetry, more than any other art, except music, has a compelling hold upon the spiritual side of life.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
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…
“What a bother health is.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder
