Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“I am very well and happy — each time, as for instance yesterday, that I see the turmoil and soot of London, I rejoice to be living in the country. I am a perfect fool for love of it.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Irony, Joy
In the rolling hills and misty valleys of Shropshire, where ancient folklore mingles with the rhythms of rural life, Mary Gladys Webb crafted some of the most evocative prose and poetry of the early twentieth century. Born on March 25, 1881, in the village of Leighton-under-the-Wrekin, and dying tragically young at forty-six on October 8, 1927, Webb compressed into her brief life an extraordinary literary legacy that…
“If you know much about your work – why you work, how you work, your aims – you are probably not a poet.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow