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…
“If you call a spade a diamond some people will think you are frivolous and affected, but other people will understand how much blacker things may be said about spades by the simple trick of pretending that they are diamonds.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Irony, Joy
On May 30, 1903, a child was born who would become one of the most celebrated voices of the Harlem Renaissance, yet whose origins remain shrouded in the kind of mystery that seems almost poetic in retrospect. Countee Cullen's exact birthplace has been disputed—some records suggest New York City, others Louisville, Kentucky, and still others Baltimore, Maryland. This uncertainty about his origins would prove oddly fit…
“Whether they relish the situation or not, Negroes should be concerned with making good impressions. They cannot do this by throwing wide every door of the racial entourage, to the wholesale gaze of the world at large. Decency demands that some things be kept secret; diplomacy demands it.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
Elinor Wylie:
somerville, new jersey, nets to catch the wind, velvet shoes, wild peaches, black armour, horace wylie, philip hichborn.
Countee Cullen:
harlem renaissance, new york city, w.e.b. du bois, color, yet do i marvel, incident, copper sun, the ballad of the brown girl.
