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
Dorothy Parker
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…
“She is not a poet of nature, in the ordinary sense of the term.”
Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on 22 August 1893 and dead on 7 June 1967, became one of the most recognizable voices of twentieth-century American letters: a poet of compressed heartbreak, a theater and book critic of dangerous precision, a short-story writer of unusual psychological acuity, a screenwriter, and a public political dissenter. For much of her life, she was treated as the emblem of a particular…
“There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
About 5,600 km separate Clapham, London, England from West End, New Jersey, 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. Dorothy Parker: manhattan, algonquin hotel, jazz age, edwin pond parker ii, enough rope, sunset gun, death and taxes, vanity fair.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Amy Levy: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow. Dorothy Parker: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.
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