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…
“I come to no conclusion as to what is to-day, or what may be to-morrow, American poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Peace
Louis MacNeice was born on 12 September 1907 in Belfast, the youngest child of John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret Clesham. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman who would later become a bishop, and the family moved shortly after Louis's birth to Carrickfergus, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where the boy grew up in the rectory beneath the squat Norman keep of the castle. It was an apparent…
“I think that the poet is only an extension — or, if you prefer it, a concentration — of the ordinary man.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Longing, Despair
