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.
John Masefield
Elizabeth Devereux
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Edward Masefield was born on 1 June 1878 in Ledbury, Herefordshire, a market town on the borderlands of England and Wales, and died on 12 May 1967 at Abingdon, then in Berkshire. During his long life he became one of Britain’s most recognizable poets: a writer of sailors, fields, foxhunts, village sinners, mythic heroes, children’s dreams, national ceremonies, and private grief. He was also a novelist, playwrigh…
“The sea is a great thing, and the sea is a hard thing.”
Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…
About 10,989 km separate Ledbury, Herefordshire, England from Singapore. 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.
John Masefield: ledbury, herefordshire, hms conway, salt-water ballads, sea fever, the everlasting mercy, constance de la cherois crommelin, the tragedy of pompey the great. Elizabeth Devereux: singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement.
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.
John Masefield: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.
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