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…
“Life isn't one damn thing after another. It's the same damn thing again and again.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849 and died there on 19 November 1887, only thirty-eight years later. Her name is now inseparable from “The New Colossus,” the sonnet whose plea for the world’s “tired,” “poor,” and “huddled masses” has become the verbal companion to the Statue of Liberty. Yet the familiarity of those lines has often obscured the larger achievement of the woman who wrote them. Lazar…
“I cannot resist the impulse of expressing to you my extreme disappointment at finding you have so far modified the enthusiastic estimate you held of my literary labors as to refuse me a place in the large and miscellaneous collection of poems you have just edited. I find myself treated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder
