Strickland Gillilan was born on 21 September 1869 in Jackson County, Ohio, a region whose rural rhythms, small-town sociability, and vigorous political culture supplied much of the material from which he would make a career. He died on 25 April 1954 in Baltimore, Maryland, after a long life spent as a journalist, lecturer, humorist, versifier, and public entertainer. In the literary histories that privilege modernism…
“I am a professional public speaker, not one who bugles around to the boys for the reward of a meal.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Children's Verse, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony
Vachel Lindsay, born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay on November 10, 1879, in Springfield, Illinois, and dead by his own hand on December 5, 1931, in the same Midwestern city, lived a life as dramatic and rhythmically charged as the poems he declaimed on lecture platforms and village greens across America. Often called the “Prairie Troubadour” or the “singing poet,” he sought nothing less than a rebirth of poetry as an oral,…
“The art of poetry is the art of making the commonplace uncommon.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder
