To my knowledge, there’s no situation, no case, in the Modernist revolution of English poetry quite like that of Amy Lowell, who for around a decade from 1915 to 1925 made herself a significant force in the popularization and dissemination of short free verse,* yet was often derided by others writing in this style, and … Continue reading Amy Lowell’s November
Here’s something I’ve noted in the years I’ve been doing this: these quarterly Top 10 lists advantage pieces posted earlier in the season since they have more weeks to accumulate listens and likes. So it was quite an achievement for D. H. Lawrence’s “A Winter’s Tale” posted near the end of February to make it … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Project audio piece this past spring is…
Sara Teasdale wrote some of the saddest love poems I’ve ever read. Less-well remembered than she should be, for a time about 100 years ago Teasdale was the most popular and esteemed love poet in America. In 1918 she won the Pulitzer prize for a new collection of her poetry, labeled right there on the … Continue reading Sara Teasdale’s I Am Not Yours or the Love Song of Ernst Filsinger
Like Thomas Hardy or James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence is another writer remembered more as a novelist than a poet, though he published multiple books of poetry in a variety of forms in the early 20th Century. He’s hard to place in the various “schools” of poetry of his time. He was published in Imagist … Continue reading Self-Pity
I can’t say what day this happened, but it was sometime in 1916 in Davenport Iowa. A well-off, Harvard-educated man in his mid-thirties named Witter Bynner was visiting a former Harvard classmate Arthur Davison Ficke in the latter’s elegant home. Besides family wealth, both men shared an interest in the arts, and both were published … Continue reading Two men walk into a hotel room, and…
I spend an invisible part of the iceberg in this project looking around for material that I think might work combined with music. One thing invariably happens when you look broadly at something: you find connections that you didn’t expect you’d find. Here’s something I’ve noticed this fall: around 1875 or so, in a small, … Continue reading The Young Intellectual
