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
Eva Gore-Booth
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…
“And all pretense was gone, and any barrier of tongue.”
Eva Selina Laura Gore-Booth was born on 22 May 1870 at Lissadell House, the great neo-classical estate overlooking Sligo Bay in north-west Ireland, and died in London on 30 June 1926. She was a poet, dramatist, essayist, spiritual seeker, trade-union ally, campaigner for women’s suffrage, and one half of one of the most enduring partnerships in the history of British and Irish reform. Her name was long overshadowed b…
“I question whether ever war has ever been fought for a good cause, though the soldiers who fought it may have been deluded into thinking so.”
About 6,894 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from Lissadell House, County Sligo, Ireland. 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. Eva Gore-Booth: lissadell house, sligo bay, esther roper, women's suffrage, the sorrowful princess, the one and the many, irish literary revival, anglo-irish protestant.
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. Eva Gore-Booth: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.
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