William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite entered the world on December 6, 1878, in Boston, Massachusetts, a city pulsing with literary ambition and the lingering echoes of abolitionist fervor. He departed it on June 8, 1962, at his home on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, New York, after a brief illness, at the age of eighty-three. In the eighty-three years between those dates, Braithwaite forged a remarkable life as poet, cr…
“It is not intellect that has brought this about; less has it been due to education; it has been due to character and character is the expression of habits and ideas.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Peace
On a crisp December day in 1889, in the bustling industrial heart of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, William Hervey Allen Jr. entered the world. Born on December 8 to a middle-class family—his father, an inventive engineer who devised an automatic blast furnace stoker that helped power the steel mills—young Hervey grew up amid the clang of factories and the haze of smoke that defined the city’s relentless energy. He would…
“Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Wonder, Fear
