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
Lizette Woodworth Reese was born on 9 January 1856 in the Greenspring Valley area of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on 17 December 1935. Her long life joined two very different literary ages. She was formed by the cadences, moral seriousness, and cultivated sentiment of nineteenth-century verse, yet some of her finest poems possess the compression, pictorial clarity, and emotional reserve that late…
“None of us ever escape the first few years of our lives. They make a mould into which we are cast, and though it may be broken, and we turned loose, some remnant of it, some intangible evil or lovely thing or both, will remain with us, like the odor to a flower, or the smoothness to a piece of ivory. It is part of the immortality of youth.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
