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.
Hildegard of Bingen
Hilda Doolittle
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Hildegard of Bingen, born around 1098 and dead on 17 September 1179, was among the most astonishingly various voices of the twelfth century: abbess, visionary, theological writer, poet, composer, correspondent, preacher, administrator, and observer of the natural world. To call her simply a “medieval mystic,” though true as far as it goes, is to make her smaller than she was. Her life unfolded within the institutions…
“The soul is not in the body as in a house, but as a hinge is in a door.”
Hilda Doolittle, who published almost all her work as H.D., was born on 10 September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died on 27 September 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland. Few modern writers have so thoroughly transformed apparent limitation into artistic amplitude. The initials by which she became famous could seem austere, even impersonal: a pair of letters fit for the clean, compressed poems associated with Imagis…
“No answer was final. The very answer held something of death, of finality, of Dead Sea fruit.”
About 6,289 km separate Bermersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 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.
Hildegard of Bingen: bermersheim, rhineland, scivias, symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum, jutta of sponheim, volmar, richardis of stade, abbess. Hilda Doolittle: bethlehem, pennsylvania, ezra pound, imagism, sea garden, ocean imagery, greek mythology, richard aldington, bryn mawr college.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Hildegard of Bingen: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness. Hilda Doolittle: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.
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