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
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
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, somehow, the eyes of that crowd began to pivot about him.”
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall was born on 14 September 1883 at Gunnersbury, then in Middlesex, England, and died on 22 April 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During her lifetime she was among the best-known and most admired poets in Canada, a writer whose delicately fashioned lyrics, religious imagination, and exact attention to the natural world won readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her posthumous reput…
“Being a poet in the present state of the market is like saying How is your hare-lip today?”
About 7,533 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England. 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. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: gunnersbury, vancouver, two ears of corn, the drift of pinions, charles g. d. roberts, canadian poets, victorian aestheticism, catholic church.
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. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder.
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