Joaquin Miller, born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on September 8, 1837, and dead on February 17, 1913, lived a life that seemed designed to invite legend. He was a poet, journalist, lawyer, teacher, dramatist, lecturer, rancher, and relentless self-inventor. To admirers in the nineteenth century, he was the “Poet of the Sierras,” a bard who had given the American West its own grand, romantic voice. To skeptics, he was an…
“The poet's trade is the hardest trade of all trades in the world; his compensation is the poorest; his triumphs the fewest; not one in ten thousand can earn his bread at it.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Howard Phelps Putnam was born in 1894 in Allston, Massachusetts, then a distinctly suburban and semi-rural part of Boston, and died on July 3, 1948, in Jamaica Plain. He belonged to the generation of American writers formed between the confident cultural inheritance of the nineteenth century and the disillusioning modernity of the First World War. His reputation never became as large as those of several Yale contempo…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Longing, Fear