In the sun-dappled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings entered the world with a quiet promise of rebellion that would one day shatter the conventions of American poetry. Known to family and friends simply as Estlin, and to the world as E.E. Cummings—or, in the lowercase stylings that publishers later adopted for his name—he would become one of the twentieth century’s most…
“The artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality
Lew R. Sarett, the poet of the wilderness, was born Lewis Zaratzsky—later Saretsky—on May 16, 1888, in the crowded immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago, Illinois. His parents, Rudolph Zaratzsky, a clothing cutter from Poland, and Jeanette Bloch from Lithuania, had arrived in America seeking opportunity amid the waves of Eastern European migration. As their only child, young Lew grew up in a household shaped by both the…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Anger, Irony, Joy
