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.
E. Nesbit
Grace Fallow Norton
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edith Nesbit, who published most often as E. Nesbit, was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, then part of Surrey and now within south London. She died on 4 May 1924 at New Romney, Kent. In the years between those dates she became one of the most inventive writers for children in English, an accomplished poet, a novelist of adult life, a writer of ghost stories and social comedy, a social…
“Simple rhymes learned when you are very young stay with you all your life.”
Grace Fallow Norton, born on 29 October 1876 in Northfield, Minnesota, and deceased in 1926, belongs to that large and consequential company of American poets whose work was respected in its own moment yet gradually slipped from broad public view. Her surviving reputation rests chiefly on a small body of lyric poetry, especially the 1912 collection Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph’s, a book whose title alone suggest…
About 6,499 km separate Kennington, Surrey, England from Northfield, Minnesota, 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.
E. Nesbit: kennington, new romney, hubert bland, the railway children, five children and it, the story of the treasure seekers, fabian society, songs of love and empire. Grace Fallow Norton: northfield, minnesota, little gray songs from st. joseph's, smith college, christina rossetti, elizabeth barrett browning, emily dickinson, brontë sisters.
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.
E. Nesbit: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Grace Fallow Norton: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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