Through the Amber: The Obscure Philosophy of Francis Vielé-Griffin Among the underlit oases of Symbolist literature dwells Francis Vielé-Griffin, a queasily hyphenated name that echoes in the chambers of forgotten experimentation. Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1864, Vielé-Griffin was a Franco-American poet who disavowed the conventions of rhyme in French verse with a furious calm….
Category: Writers and Poets
This is the smoking lounge of the blog—the velvet-curtained space where writers and poets, both spectral and flesh-bound, gather to whisper, declaim, and occasionally howl. Here you’ll find sharp quills, ink-stained confessions, literary provocations, and verses that may or may not be approved by any known academy.
From masterful miniatures to derailed epics, this category celebrates the written word in all its unruly glory. Expect brilliance, bewilderment, and the occasional typewriter jam left in for effect.
Welcome to Writers and Poets—a curated chaos of language for those who still believe in its spell.
József Erdélyi and the Poem as Paradox: A Journey through the Slopes of Obscurity
József Erdélyi and the Poem as Paradox: A Journey through the Slopes of Obscurity József Erdélyi (1896–1978) remains a deeply enigmatic figure on the periphery of Hungarian poetic heritage—an ethnographer, translator, and lyrical visionary who, despite the breadth of his intellect and the quiet severity of his linguistic craft, is seldom discussed outside circles of…
Descending into the Light: The Reclusive Vision of Ivan Il’in-Petrosky
Descending into the Light: The Reclusive Vision of Ivan Il’in-Petrosky Born into the grim heat of a sclerotic empire, Ivan Il’in-Petrosky (1893–1947) remains a cipher etched in the marginalia of Russian poetic history. A contemporary of the Russian Symbolists and an occasional correspondent of Andrei Bely, Il’in-Petrosky eschewed the salons of Moscow and Petersburg, choosing…
The Anticosmic Lyricism of Gustav Landauer
The Anticosmic Lyricism of Gustav Landauer It is the intricate fate of some writers—and even more so, of poets who carry the burden of vision—to be perpetually exiled from the center of literary discourse. One such exilic blaze in the palimpsest of 20th-century letters is Gustav Landauer, a German-Jewish intellectual, theorist of anarchism, translator of…
Through the Sandglass of Lucien Suel: A Portrait of Rust and Conscious History
Through the Sandglass of Lucien Suel: A Portrait of Rust and Conscious History Lucien Suel, the north-of-France-born poet, novelist, and publisher, remains a figure of strange alchemical presence in contemporary French letters—a sort of literary tramway conductor guiding the specter of the avant-garde through industrial graveyards and metaphysical peat bogs. Born in 1948 in Guarbecque,…
The Mudward Prophet: Excavating the Worldview of Leonora Speyer
The Mudward Prophet: Excavating the Worldview of Leonora Speyer In the shadow of early 20th-century American letters rests the neglected figure of Leonora Speyer (1872–1956), a poet of wealthy lineage, trained under the eaves of music conservatories, whose verses defy standard cartographies of Modernism. Born in Washington, D.C., Speyer lived for years in Europe as…
Gustaf Fröding and the Metaphysics of Melancholy
Between Attic Dust and Azure: The Obscured Radiance of Gustaf Fröding Gustaf Fröding (1860–1911), a Swedish poet shrouded in the duality of lyrical genius and mental affliction, occupies a porous threshold between canon and oblivion. While he remains celebrated in academic and Scandinavian literary circles, globally he exists at the periphery—an echo rather than a…
Bernard Spencer and the Metaphysics of Exile
Bernard Spencer and the Poetics of Exile Bernard Spencer, though often relegated to the forlorn shelves of overlooked poets, was a singular English voice that traversed Mediterranean landscapes with a distinct language of introspection, subtlety, and fragmentation. Born in Madras (now Chennai), India, in 1909 and educated at Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford,…
Ronald Johnson and the Poetics of Metaphysical Erasure
The Forgotten Lucidity of Ronald Johnson: A Hermetic Pilgrim of American Poetics In the sonorous underbrush of postmodern American poetry, amid the titans of grand publicity, there remains Ronald Johnson (1935–1998), a poet whose work—divergent, luminous, operating on a subterranean blueprint of the cosmos—has increasingly drawn scholarly and esoteric attention. Born in Ashland, Kansas and…