Born in 1876 amid the lingering shadows of slavery in Tennessee, Charles Frederick White entered a world still scarred by the chains his parents had worn. The oldest of ten children born to formerly enslaved parents, he carried the weight of their hard-won freedom from the very beginning. His family soon migrated northward to Springfield, Illinois, seeking better opportunities in a state that had once sheltered Abrah…
“If you had been deprived of an education in your early youth; if then you had run away from home to obtain that education”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Devotional Poets, Nature Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Anger, Sorrow, Despair
William Brighty Rands was born on 24 December 1823, in Chelsea, then a district on the western edge of London and already a place where commerce, domestic life, artistic ambition, and metropolitan poverty met in close quarters. He died on 23 April 1882, having lived only fifty-eight years, and his name is now far less familiar than the names of several Victorian writers whose work has dated more severely. Yet Rands o…
“Some of the best things said about it and what it foretells are little better than self-conscious talk to fill up time.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony
