Madison Cawein

Martin Kich (Wright State University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 23 Mar 1865
Died 8 Dec 1914
Activity 1888-1914

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Poet

Resources

Cawein's Works

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Madison Cawein’s ambition was to become one of the great lyric poets of the United States, if not of the English-speaking world. Today, he is largely forgotten. When he is remembered, it is for one of three reasons. First, Cawein is associated with the Midwest regionalism of the late 19th and very early 20th centuries—that is, with the quaint regionalism of James Whitcomb Riley that pre-dated the much more critical regionalism of Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. Second, Cawein produced a group of lyrics treating the Arthurian myths that provide a roughly contemporaneous American complement to Tennyson’s

Idylls of the King

. Lastly, Cawein produced a doleful lyric called “The Waste Land” that probably served as a source for T.S. Eliot’s much longer, more…

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2850 words

Citation: Kich, Martin. "Madison Cawein". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=800, accessed 25 November 2024.]