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.
Lola Ridge
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Lola Ridge stands as a compelling and somewhat enigmatic figure in the landscape of early twentieth-century American poetry. While her name may not resonate with the same immediate recognition as her contemporaries Ezra Pound, H.D., or William Carlos Williams, her contribution to the modernist movement was profound, particularly in her fusion of avant-garde aesthetics with unflinching social realism. Born on December…
“Woman is not and never has been man's natural inferior.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“Character is the result of the cultivation of the highest and noblest qualities in human nature, and putting those qualities to practical use.”
About 5,902 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, USA. Both have ground in New York City and New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Lola Ridge: greenwich village, the ghetto, red flag, sun-up and other poems, david lyman, the little review, margaret anderson, social realism. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Lola Ridge: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.
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