Herbert Sherman Gorman entered the world in 1893 in Springfield, Massachusetts, a bustling industrial city nestled along the Connecticut River, where the hum of factories and the clang of railroads shaped the rhythms of daily life. Though the precise day of his birth remains unrecorded in many accounts, his arrival coincided with an America on the cusp of modernity, one foot still planted in the Victorian era and the…
“I will never write another biography of a living man. It is too difficult and thankless a task.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
Mark Van Doren came into the world on June 13, 1894, in the small farming community of Hope, Illinois, the fourth of five sons born to Dr. Charles Lucius Van Doren, a dedicated country doctor of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Eudora Ann Butz, a woman of formidable spirit who had once delivered mail on horseback across the open prairies. The Van Doren household pulsed with the rhythms of rural life—plowing fields, tendi…
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
