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
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and died on 19 October 1950 at her home in Austerlitz, New York. During her lifetime she became one of the most visible and commercially successful poets in the United States: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a celebrated public reader, a playwright, a lyricist, a political writer, and an emblem of the modern, sexually independent “New Woman.” Her fame…
“The poet is not a man who says what he thinks, but a man who says what he feels.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
