William Carlos Williams was born on 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, and died there on 4 March 1963. Few American writers made such a compelling argument, through both their lives and their art, that poetry could be found not in a remote ideal realm but in the streets outside one’s door, in a patient’s anxious face, in a backyard garden, in a refrigerator, or beside a muddy chicken yard. He was a physicia…
“I wrote the whole damn thing with a change. I was thinking of terza rima, but gave up rime—the very vague imitation of Dante.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Peace
Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…
“The country is not a place to escape to, but a place to live in.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
