Stephen Vincent Benét was a poet, novelist, and storyteller whose voice captured the sprawling, contradictory soul of America with a warmth and vigor that few writers of his era could match. In an age when modernism often turned inward toward fragmentation and irony, Benét looked outward, embracing history, folklore, and the ordinary heroism of everyday people. His words thrum with the crack of rifles at Harpers Ferr…
“We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy—the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
Sam Walter Foss was born on 19 June 1858 in Candia, New Hampshire, a small rural community whose fields, roads, churches, village shops, and close social networks supplied the emotional landscape of much of his later poetry. He died on 26 February 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the age of fifty-two. Between those dates he became one of the best-known popular poets in the United States, though not one of its mo…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Peace, Joy
