Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…
“I send out my first little book trusting it may find kind, considerate friends.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
Achsa White Sprague was born on 17 November 1827 in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a small mountain community whose austere beauty and close social fabric helped form her imagination. She died there on 6 July 1862, only thirty-four years old by the modern method of counting age, though many nineteenth-century notices described her as being in her thirty-fifth year. In the short interval between those dates, Sprague became…
“I am not afraid to die, for death to me is but the threshold of a higher, purer, and more glorious life.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
