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.
Amy Levy
Gertrude Stein
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Amy Judith Levy was born in Clapham, south London, on 10 November 1861, and died in London on 10 September 1889. In fewer than twenty-eight years she became one of the most distinctive writers of the late Victorian period: a poet of compressed feeling and formal intelligence, a novelist of urban and communal life, an essayist alert to women’s changing circumstances, and a figure of unusual importance in the histories…
“The poetry of Christina Rossetti is essentially the poetry of a woman.”
Gertrude Stein was born on 3 February 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then a separate city and now part of Pittsburgh, and died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Few modern writers have made language itself so central to the drama of literature. Stein was a novelist, poet, playwright, critic, lecturer, collector, salon host, memoirist, and commanding public personality. She was also, in collaboration…
“I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, of course, are more important.”
About 5,981 km separate Clapham, London, England from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. 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.
Amy Levy: clapham, anglo-jewish writing, feminist literature, queer literary culture, xantippe and other verse, a minor poet and other verse, newnham college, the romance of a shop. Gertrude Stein: allegheny, pittsburgh, neuilly-sur-seine, alice b. toklas, three lives, tender buttons, the making of americans, harvard annex.
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.
Amy Levy: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow. Gertrude Stein: Wonder, Irony, Tenderness.
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