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.
Helen Dudley was born on 3 June 1886 in Chicago, Illinois, and died in 1932, leaving behind a body of work that was small in quantity but unusually concentrated in feeling. Her name has never become as familiar as those of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, H. D., Amy Lowell, or Elinor Wylie, yet her poems belong to the same unsettled and fertile era in American writing. She wrote during the transition from late…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Fanny Greville, born Frances Macartney about 1724 and dead on 28 July 1789, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in eighteenth-century English poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a small number of poems, above all “A Prayer for Indifference,” rather than on a large published oeuvre or a public literary career of the sort enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Yet the very modesty of her exta…
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
About 6,232 km separate
Chicago, Illinois, USA from
England.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Helen Dudley:
chicago, poems, 1919, imagism, harriet monroe, emotional reserve, lyric form, solitude.
Fanny Greville:
county tyrone, anglo-irish, fulke greville, a prayer for indifference, the court of death, samuel johnson, eighteenth-century poetry, culture of sensibility.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.