Maxwell Bodenheim's life reads like one of his own feverish poems—raw, defiant, laced with startling imagery, and shadowed by a restless hunger for freedom that both illuminated and destroyed him. Born into the humid anonymity of a small Southern town, he rose to become the self-crowned King of Greenwich Village bohemians during the glittering, gin-soaked Jazz Age, only to tumble into poverty, ridicule, and a violent…
“An ironist with any deftness and penetration in this world must anticipate both attack and indifference with a finely raised, stoical head.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
In the flickering gaslight of late nineteenth-century America, as the nation struggled to reconcile its frontier spirit with emerging urban sophistication, William Vaughn Moody emerged as a literary voice uniquely suited to capture this profound cultural tension. Born on July 8, 1869, in Spencer, Indiana, and dying far too young on October 17, 1910, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Moody's forty-one years encompassed a…
“I think you are not tolerant enough of the instinct for conquest in language, the attempt to push out its boundaries, to win for it continually some new swiftness, some rare compression, to distil from it a more opaline drop.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
