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.
Helen Hamilton, born on 12 March 1882 and dead on 7 November 1954, occupies an unusual place in the literary history of the First World War. Her name survives most securely through a small number of fiercely memorable poems, above all “The Jingo-Woman,” a work whose bitter dramatic irony has made it one of the most frequently recovered anti-war poems written from a woman’s perspective. Yet the biographical record sur…
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Women Poets
Jessie Pope was born on 18 March 1868 in Leicester, England, and died on 14 December 1941, during the second year of another world war. She is remembered chiefly, and controversially, as one of the most conspicuous popular poets of British patriotic verse during the First World War. Yet to reduce her entirely to the recruitment poems that later generations have found disturbing is to overlook the long, energetic, and…
Helen Hamilton:
the jingo-woman, first world war, anti-war poetry, british poet, great war, women's public speech, patriotism debates, elizabeth barrett browning.
Jessie Pope:
leicester, first world war, who's for the game?, the call, joseph pope, paper pellets, airy nothings, punch.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.