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…
“Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“Why could not a single man, even with the whole world against him, live up to some big ideal! To be an artist simply for one's own gratification.”
Neighbourhood:
Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
