Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849 and died there on 19 November 1887, only thirty-eight years later. Her name is now inseparable from “The New Colossus,” the sonnet whose plea for the world’s “tired,” “poor,” and “huddled masses” has become the verbal companion to the Statue of Liberty. Yet the familiarity of those lines has often obscured the larger achievement of the woman who wrote them. Lazar…
“I cannot resist the impulse of expressing to you my extreme disappointment at finding you have so far modified the enthusiastic estimate you held of my literary labors as to refuse me a place in the large and miscellaneous collection of poems you have just edited. I find myself treated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“It is as wrong to encourage the man addicted to the vice of borrowing, as the one with the vice of alcohol or drugs.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
