Joseph Milton Hayes, known to the public as J. Milton Hayes, was born in Bristol on 13 January 1884 and died on 6 February 1940. During his lifetime he became one of the best-known writers of recitation verse in Britain, a poet whose work was heard as often as it was read. His celebrity rested especially on “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God,” a narrative poem whose opening line, “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol…
“It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere. Then India, everyone has his own idea of India. Don't tell the public too much. Strike chords.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“But, Degas, it is not with ideas that one makes verse. It is with words.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
