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.
Edith M. Thomas
Katharine Tynan Hinkson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edith Matilda Thomas was born on 12 August 1854 in Chatham, Ohio, and died on 13 September 1925 in New York City. During her lifetime she was admired as one of the most accomplished American lyric poets of the late nineteenth century, praised by editors, fellow writers, and readers for verse that joined close observation of nature to emotional reserve, formal intelligence, and a searching spiritual imagination. Yet s…
“My birthdays are the most melancholy days I know.”
Katharine Tynan Hinkson, born Katharine Tynan on 23 January 1861 and dead on 2 April 1931, was one of the most industrious and visible Irish writers of her generation. Poet, novelist, reviewer, memoirist, editor, children’s writer, and biographer, she published with a speed and abundance that can make her career seem almost bewildering to a modern reader. Her name is most often associated with the first phase of the…
“There is an Irish way of paying compliments as though they were irresistible truths which makes what otherwise would be an impertinence, delightful.”
About 5,688 km separate Chatham, Ohio, USA from Clondalkin, County 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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Edith M. Thomas: chatham, ohio, new york city, helen hunt jackson, a new year's masque, the inverted torch, lyrics and sonnets, northeastern ohio, romantic poetry. Katharine Tynan Hinkson: county dublin, whitehall, catholic farming family, w. b. yeats, christina rossetti, irish literary revival, shamrocks and ballads, the handsome brandons.
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.
Edith M. Thomas: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Katharine Tynan Hinkson: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.