Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political aspirant, a man of forceful opinions, Southern sympathies, and unstable prospects. His mother, Isabelle Mood…
“For my part I should be as satisfied to play tennis with the net down as to write verse with no verse form set to stay me.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
Mark Van Doren came into the world on June 13, 1894, in the small farming community of Hope, Illinois, the fourth of five sons born to Dr. Charles Lucius Van Doren, a dedicated country doctor of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Eudora Ann Butz, a woman of formidable spirit who had once delivered mail on horseback across the open prairies. The Van Doren household pulsed with the rhythms of rural life—plowing fields, tendi…
“Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
