Genevieve Taggard was born on November 28, 1894, in the small farming community of Waitsburg, Washington, a place of dust-choked fields and modest wooden houses that would later stand in stark contrast to the lush paradise of her childhood memories. She died on November 8, 1948, in a New York City hospital, just shy of her fifty-fourth birthday, her body worn down by chronic hypertension that had increasingly confine…
“Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me? No indeed. I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
In the vast and often storm-tossed landscape of American literature, certain voices emerge not from the bustling centers of culture, but from the quiet, salt-sprayed margins. Celia Laighton Thaxter, born on June 29, 1835, on the windswept island of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was such a voice—a poet whose work bloomed with the wildflowers of the Isles of Shoals, whose verses carried the rhythm of the Atlantic tides, a…
“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness