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 hardest battle is to be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality
Jessie Pope was born on 18 March 1868 in Leicester, England, and died on 14 December 1941, during the second year of another world war. She is remembered chiefly, and controversially, as one of the most conspicuous popular poets of British patriotic verse during the First World War. Yet to reduce her entirely to the recruitment poems that later generations have found disturbing is to overlook the long, energetic, and…
Neighbourhood:
Light Verse Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Irony, Joy
