Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Sara Teasdale
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died there on 29 January 1933. During her lifetime she became one of the best-known American lyric poets of the early twentieth century, admired for verse that appeared effortless: brief, melodious, emotionally direct, and exquisitely shaped. Her poems spoke of love, solitude, desire, beauty, loss, the changing seasons, and death. Their clarity made…
“The things that matter most are the things that cannot be held in the hand.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Her arrival marked the first in her family born in England in over two centuries, as the Barrett fortune stemmed from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. The family soon moved to Hope End, a sprawling estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire…
“I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment!”
About 6,512 km separate St. Louis, Missouri, USA from Durham, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Sara Teasdale: st. louis, sonnets to duse, helen of troy, rivers to the sea, love songs, vachel lindsay, ernst filsinger, mary institute. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: county durham, hope end, the battle of marathon, the seraphim and other poems, the cry of the children, robert browning, sonnets from the portuguese, aurora leigh.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Sara Teasdale: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness.
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