Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“It is this vagueness of thought endeavoring to sound the foundation of all things, this want of definition, hinting at ideas that cannot be precisely expressed, that give to art its ultimate and finest significance.”
Neighbourhood:
Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
Alan Seeger was born in New York City on 22 June 1888, into an American family whose comfort, education, and international connections gave him unusual freedom while also placing before him the question of what a privileged young man ought to do with his life. He died on 4 July 1916, age twenty-eight, in the Battle of the Somme while serving in the French Foreign Legion. In the years between those dates he became, in…
“I have no regrets. I am glad I went.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
