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.
Alice Corbin
Mary Reynolds Aldis
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…
“All these furnish native folk-nutriment for our poetic soil.”
In the grand narrative of American literature, certain figures occupy a peculiar position—neither entirely forgotten nor properly celebrated, their contributions hovering in that twilight zone between obscurity and recognition. Mary Reynolds Aldis, who lived from 1872 to 1949, stands as one such figure: a woman whose drawing rooms hosted the brightest lights of Chicago's literary renaissance, whose one-act plays capt…
About 1,011 km separate St. Louis, Missouri, USA from Dunkirk, New York, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism. Mary Reynolds Aldis: dunkirk, new york, arthur taylor aldis, chicago literary renaissance, flashlights, plays for small stages, the man in the street, lake forest, little theater movement.
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.
Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Mary Reynolds Aldis: Sorrow, Longing, Spirituality.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.