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.
Cecil Frances Alexander
Adelaide Crapsey
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Cecil Frances Alexander, born Cecil Frances Humphreys on 14 April 1818 and dead on 12 October 1895, became one of the most widely sung and influential hymn writers of the nineteenth century. Her name may be less immediately familiar than the opening lines of her best-known hymns, yet “Once in Royal David’s City,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and “Jesus Calls Us o’er the Tumult”…
“Thank God! I do like to hear that.”
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“Scansion isolates, for the sake of analysis, the basic metrical units of verse—feet; the same analytical scrutiny must, I believe, be given to the basic phonetic units of speech.”
About 4,880 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Saranac Lake, New York, 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.
Cecil Frances Alexander: anglo-irish protestant, william alexander, once in royal david's city, all things bright and beautiful, there is a green hill far away, jesus calls us o’er the tumult, hymns for little children, verses for holy seasons. Adelaide Crapsey: saranac lake, cinquain, imagist poetry, algernon sidney crapsey, vassar college, smith college, november night, the warning.
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.
Cecil Frances Alexander: Spirituality, Wonder, Joy. Adelaide Crapsey: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder.
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