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.
Edna Wahlert McCourt
Fiona Macleod
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…
“They see the illogicalness of my position.”
Fiona Macleod, whose published life ran from 12 September 1855 to 12 December 1905, was the most celebrated and perplexing literary identity created by the Scottish writer William Sharp. To call Fiona merely Sharp’s pseudonym, though factually necessary, is insufficient. She was a sustained artistic persona, a voice with its own apparent temperament, correspondence, friendships, themes, and public reputation. Through…
“The Celt is a dreamer, but he is also a mystic.”
About 7,034 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from Paisley, Scotland. 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.
Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine. Fiona Macleod: scottish, celtic revival, pharais, the mountain lovers, the sin-eater, from the hills of dream, william sharp, bessie sharp.
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.
Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Fiona Macleod: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.