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.
A. Mary F. Robinson
Vachel Lindsay
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, who published most often as A. Mary F. Robinson and became successively known in France as Madame Darmesteter and Madame Duclaux, was born on 27 February 1857 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and died in Aurillac, France, on 9 February 1944. Her unusually long life carried her from the high Victorian age into the Second World War; her writing career connected English Romantic and aestheti…
“I send forth this little book with scant expectance of immediate success.”
Vachel Lindsay, born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay on November 10, 1879, in Springfield, Illinois, and dead by his own hand on December 5, 1931, in the same Midwestern city, lived a life as dramatic and rhythmically charged as the poems he declaimed on lecture platforms and village greens across America. Often called the “Prairie Troubadour” or the “singing poet,” he sought nothing less than a rebirth of poetry as an oral,…
“The art of poetry is the art of making the commonplace uncommon.”
About 6,507 km separate Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England from Springfield, Illinois, USA. 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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
A. Mary F. Robinson: leamington spa, aurillac, madame darmesteter, madame duclaux, a handful of honeysuckle, the new arcadia, emily brontë, james darmesteter. Vachel Lindsay: springfield illinois, prairie troubadour, higher vaudeville, general william booth enters into heaven, the congo, harriet monroe, rhythmic poetry, walking journeys.
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.
A. Mary F. Robinson: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Vachel Lindsay: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder.
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