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.
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
Sara Teasdale
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall was born on 14 September 1883 at Gunnersbury, then in Middlesex, England, and died on 22 April 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During her lifetime she was among the best-known and most admired poets in Canada, a writer whose delicately fashioned lyrics, religious imagination, and exact attention to the natural world won readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her posthumous reput…
“Let some of your rules as to form go, and sing.”
Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died there on 29 January 1933. During her lifetime she became one of the best-known American lyric poets of the early twentieth century, admired for verse that appeared effortless: brief, melodious, emotionally direct, and exquisitely shaped. Her poems spoke of love, solitude, desire, beauty, loss, the changing seasons, and death. Their clarity made…
“The warmth of the idea that generated the poem should make it clear, ductile, a finished creation, before it touches cold white paper.”
About 6,751 km separate Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England from St. Louis, Missouri, 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.
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: gunnersbury, vancouver, two ears of corn, the drift of pinions, charles g. d. roberts, canadian poets, victorian aestheticism, catholic church. Sara Teasdale: st. louis, sonnets to duse, helen of troy, rivers to the sea, love songs, vachel lindsay, ernst filsinger, mary institute.
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.
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder. Sara Teasdale: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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