Joshua Henry Jones Jr. was born in 1876 in the sun-baked fields of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a place still echoing with the fragile hopes of Reconstruction. He died on December 14, 1955, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-nine, his life a remarkable arc that carried him from the segregated South to the bustling intellectual and political circles of New England. A poet, novelist, composer, journalist, a…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Nature Poets, Poet-Musicians, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
The story of Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) reads like something from a Gothic novel, yet it is the true foundation upon which one of twentieth-century America's most psychologically complex poets built his life and work. Born into comfortable circumstances in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken seemed destined for the privileged life his family background suggested. His father, William Ford Aiken, had s…
“It is not verbal merely, nor rhythmic; for it remains in translation. It springs from the ideas themselves.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness