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.
Alice Meynell
Charlotte Mew
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Alice Meynell, born Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson on 11 October 1847 and dead on 27 November 1922, was one of the most distinctive English writers to work across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. A poet of exquisite compression, an essayist of alert and sensuous intelligence, a critic, editor, Catholic public intellectual, and campaigner for women’s suffrage, she made a literary identity that cannot be r…
“Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure.”
Charlotte Mew, born Charlotte Mary Mew on 15 November 1869 and dead on 24 March 1928, occupies a singular and often haunting position in English poetry. She was admired in her own lifetime by writers as different as Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ezra Pound, yet her name later slipped from general literary view before being powerfully recovered by feminist, queer, and modernis…
“Not only the cry but the gesture and the accent—and so one goes on—calling up witnesses to the real thing!”
About 9 km separate Barnes, London, England from London, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Alice Meynell: edwardian, wilfrid meynell, preludes, renouncement, catholicism, francis thompson, the colour of life, the lady poverty. Charlotte Mew: london, thomas hardy, virginia woolf, the farmer's bride, the yellow book, bloomsbury, siegfried sassoon, ezra pound.
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.
Alice Meynell: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness. Charlotte Mew: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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