Hart Crane’s life was a blaze of incandescent vision cut short by the very torments that fueled his art. Born Harold Hart Crane on July 21, 1899, in the quiet village of Garrettsville, Ohio, he arrived into a world already humming with the industrial promise that would later become the spine of his poetry. His father, Clarence A. Crane, was a shrewd and ambitious candy manufacturer who would one day invent the Life S…
“Suffering is a real purification, and the worst thing I have always had to say against Christian Science is that it wilfully avoided suffering.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality
In the sun-dappled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings entered the world with a quiet promise of rebellion that would one day shatter the conventions of American poetry. Known to family and friends simply as Estlin, and to the world as E.E. Cummings—or, in the lowercase stylings that publishers later adopted for his name—he would become one of the twentieth century’s most…
“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality