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
Charles Frederick White
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.”
Born in 1876 amid the lingering shadows of slavery in Tennessee, Charles Frederick White entered a world still scarred by the chains his parents had worn. The oldest of ten children born to formerly enslaved parents, he carried the weight of their hard-won freedom from the very beginning. His family soon migrated northward to Springfield, Illinois, seeking better opportunities in a state that had once sheltered Abrah…
“He thinks as much of one person as of any other, so long as he is treated well and justly”
About 6,726 km separate Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England from Tennessee, 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. Charles Frederick White: tennessee, springfield, plea of the negro soldier, spanish-american war, eighth illinois national guard, williston seminary, who's who in philadelphia, joseph sawyer.
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. Charles Frederick White: Anger, Sorrow, Despair.
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