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
Elizabeth Devereux
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…
“Hitherto the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.”
Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…
About 10,847 km separate London, England from Singapore. 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.
Mina Loy: hamstead, london, ezra pound, t.s. eliot, gertrude stein, stephen haweis, filippo tommaso marinetti, love songs. Elizabeth Devereux: singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement.
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. Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.
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