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
Isobel Pagan
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…
“For a moment the captain and the crowd gazed into each other.”
Isobel Pagan, known in her own district as Tibbie Pagan, was born about 1740, probably near Nithhead in the parish of New Cumnock, Ayrshire, and died at Muirkirk on 3 November 1821. Her dates alone suggest a life that crossed extraordinary changes in Scottish society: she was born before the great age of Robert Burns, lived through the American and French Revolutions, witnessed the expansion of mining and ironworking…
“Was not that great nonsense?”
About 7,072 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from Near Nith-head, New Cumnock, Ayrshire, 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. Isobel Pagan: nithhead, new cumnock, muirkirk, scottish vernacular song, account of the author's lifetime, the spinning wheel, ca' the yowes to the knowes, robert burns.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Isobel Pagan: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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