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
Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“Don't let this kill you. I have run away.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Irony, Joy
