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.
Gertrude Stein
Alice Corbin
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Gertrude Stein was born on 3 February 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then a separate city and now part of Pittsburgh, and died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Few modern writers have made language itself so central to the drama of literature. Stein was a novelist, poet, playwright, critic, lecturer, collector, salon host, memoirist, and commanding public personality. She was also, in collaboration…
“You are all a lost generation.”
Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…
“Poetry is life and the only way one can know life is through poetry and the dance.”
About 896 km separate Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Gertrude Stein: allegheny, pittsburgh, neuilly-sur-seine, alice b. toklas, three lives, tender buttons, the making of americans, harvard annex. Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism.
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.
Gertrude Stein: Wonder, Irony, Tenderness. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.
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