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
Mary Monck
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…
“He appealed to their sympathy and their loyalty.”
Mary Monck, born Mary Molesworth about 1677 and dead in 1715, belongs to that important company of early modern women poets whose achievement was more substantial than their later reputation long allowed. She wrote at the meeting point of Restoration wit, Augustan order, religious meditation, private elegy, and the expanding culture of literary translation. Her surviving work is not vast, and its circumstances of pre…
About 7,082 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from Dublin, 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. Mary Monck: anglo-irish society, robert molesworth, letitia coote, george monck, verses wrote on her death-bed at bath, restoration wit, augustan order, literary translation.
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. Mary Monck: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing.
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