John Ruskin was born in London on 8 February 1819, the only child of John James Ruskin and Margaret Cox Ruskin. He would become one of the nineteenth century’s most forceful and distinctive voices: an art critic, social thinker, lecturer, draftsman, historian of architecture, environmental observer, moral philosopher, and writer of prose whose rhythms often approached poetry. Though he is not chiefly remembered as a…
“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
Mark Van Doren came into the world on June 13, 1894, in the small farming community of Hope, Illinois, the fourth of five sons born to Dr. Charles Lucius Van Doren, a dedicated country doctor of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Eudora Ann Butz, a woman of formidable spirit who had once delivered mail on horseback across the open prairies. The Van Doren household pulsed with the rhythms of rural life—plowing fields, tendi…
“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
