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.
Mina Loy
Edna Wahlert McCourt
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the vibrant landscape of early twentieth-century modernism, where voices like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein commanded attention, another figure moved through the artistic circles of London, Paris, and New York with equal brilliance but less recognition. Mina Loy (1882-1966) was a poet, artist, actress, and feminist whose radical verse challenged conventional notions of femininity, sexuality, and poeti…
“Open your arms to the dilapidated; rehabilitate them.”
Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…
“However, I caught the captain and the Senator whispering under their flags, and I heard them laugh softly, a little like two wondering boys.”
About 7,540 km separate London, England from Denver, Colorado, USA. Both have ground in Colorado.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Mina Loy: hamstead, london, ezra pound, t.s. eliot, gertrude stein, stephen haweis, filippo tommaso marinetti, love songs. Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine.
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.
Mina Loy: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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