James Weldon Johnson entered the world on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, a bustling port city where the St. Johns River met the Atlantic and where the scars of Reconstruction still lingered in the humid air. He left it on June 26, 1938, in a car accident near Wiscasset, Maine, at the age of sixty-seven, his body laid to rest in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Between those dates stretched a life of astonish…
“The coloured people of the United States are the only people in the world who are not permitted to forget that they are coloured.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Longing
Sir Henry Taylor occupies one of the more curious niches in nineteenth-century English letters: a poet who spent his working life not in garrets or universities but behind the desk of a government office, quietly shaping the administration of Britain's colonies while writing, in his spare hours, verse dramas that made him, for a brief and dazzling season, one of the most celebrated writers in the land. He was born on…
“Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality, is but a form of self-love.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Sorrow, Spirituality
