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.
Walter de la Mare
Harold Monro
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Walter John de la Mare was born on 25 April 1873 at Charlton, then in Kent and now part of southeast London, into a family whose circumstances were modest but whose cultural inheritance was unusually varied. His father, James Edward de la Mare, worked as an official at the Bank of England; his mother, Lucy Sophia Browning, came from a family with Scottish connections. The surname preserved a French Huguenot ancestry,…
“Only the rarest kind of best is good enough for the young.”
In the heart of Georgian London, amid the tumult of a literary revolution that would reshape English poetry forever, stood a slight, melancholic figure whose contribution to modern literature far exceeded his own poetic achievements. Harold Edward Monro, born on March 14, 1879, in Brussels to Scottish parents, would become the impresario of modernism, the keeper of poetry's most famous bookshop, and a poet whose work…
“We are expecting a new dawn, converging towards some vital exuberance, a rushing, untameable new creative impulse in English poetry.”
About 234 km separate Canterbury, Kent, England from Brussels, Belgium. Both have ground in Kent.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Walter de la Mare: charlton, st paul's cathedral choir school, songs of childhood, the listeners, the three mulla-mulgars, peacock pie, elfrida ingpen, henry newbolt. Harold Monro: brussels, georgian poetry, the poetry review, poetry bookshop, milk for the cat, children of love, strange meetings, the earth for sale.
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.
Walter de la Mare: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness. Harold Monro: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.
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