1901-1940

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century as a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of artistic predecessors.

The term Objectivism was originally coined by William Carlos Williams to mean looking at a poem “with a special eye to its structural aspect, how it has been constructed.” 

An early 20th-century poetic movement that relied on the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language rather than traditional poetic diction and meter.

A poetic movement in England during the reign of George V (1910–1936) that included poets such as Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Walter de la Mare.

A group of Southern poets associated with the "Fugitive," a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s.

An artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris, affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic.

Joyce Mansour was an Egyptian-French author and part of the inner circle of postwar surrealists. She wrote 16 books of poetry as well as prose works and plays. Mansour was born in Bowden, England, to Jewish...

Charles Henri Ford was a poet, an editor, a novelist, an artist, and a cultural catalyst whose career spanned much of 20th-century modernism. Ford claimed inspiration from filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist...

Poet and Harlem Renaissance–era editor Kathleen Tankersley Young was born in rural West Texas on August 15, 1902. She subsequently gave her birthplace as Cincinnati (April 15, 1903) and New York City (1905...

English poet David Gascoyne grew up in England and Scotland, and he lived in Paris in the early 1930s. His poetry underwent several major changes during his long career. At first an Imagist, then a dedicated...

Traveling often throughout his long and productive life, Henry James wrote fiction and travel literature about Americans in Europe and Europeans in America during the great epoch of transatlantic tourism and...

A poet, playwright, lawyer, and statesman, Archibald MacLeish’s roots were firmly planted in both the new and the old worlds. His father, the son of a poor shopkeeper in Glasgow, Scotland, was born in 1837...

A distinguished poet, novelist, critic, and teacher, Robert Penn Warren won virtually every major award given to writers in the United States and was the only person to receive a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction...

Robinson Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical...

Hilaire Belloc is considered one of the most controversial and accomplished men of letters of early 20th-century England. An author whose writings continue to draw either the deep admiration or bitter contempt...

David Jones was a poet and graphic artist. He is best known for his long narrative poems In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), and for his engravings and paintings, which have won many awards. While...

The son of a Chicago attorney, Kenneth Flexner Fearing was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, and he attended public schools. He then studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a BA in 1924...

Laura Riding, later known as Laura (Riding) Jackson, was born in New York City and studied at Cornell University. She “was still in her thirties when she published her 477-page Collected Poems in 1938,” reported...

Poet Carl Sandburg was born into a poor family in Galesburg, Illinois. In his youth, he worked many odd jobs before serving in the 6th Illinois Infantry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He studied...

Fenton Johnson was born and raised in Chicago. The son of one of the city’s wealthiest African American families, he attended the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Columbia University...