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
Vachel Lindsay, born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay on November 10, 1879, in Springfield, Illinois, and dead by his own hand on December 5, 1931, in the same Midwestern city, lived a life as dramatic and rhythmically charged as the poems he declaimed on lecture platforms and village greens across America. Often called the “Prairie Troubadour” or the “singing poet,” he sought nothing less than a rebirth of poetry as an oral,…
“The art of poetry is the art of making the commonplace uncommon.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder
