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
