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 don't think I am a falcon. I think I am a life with a broken wing. I know it. But read that poem—Let no charitable hope. Now you know, red lizard.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Irony, Joy
Anne Knish, credited in some accounts with the dates 1916–1917, was not a historical poet in the ordinary biographical sense. She had no childhood, family, home town, education, intimate correspondence, or grave. Rather, she was a deliberately invented literary identity, one of the central masks in the Spectra hoax, a remarkable episode in American poetry during the first years of modernism. The name “Anne Knish” bel…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Light Verse Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Sorrow, Despair
