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.
Alice Corbin
Emily Dickinson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“Folk poetry in the United States has followed the trail of the pioneer.”
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died there on 15 May 1886. During her lifetime she was known, if at all beyond her immediate circle, as the daughter of a prominent local family, an unusually lively correspondent, a gardener, and eventually a woman who lived with increasing privacy. After her death, she emerged as one of the most startling and essential poets in th…
“Morning without you is a dwindled Dawn.”
About 1,548 km separate St. Louis, Missouri, USA from Amherst, Massachusetts, 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.
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. Emily Dickinson: amherst, massachusetts, edward dickinson, susan gilbert, because i could not stop for death, fascicles, mount holyoke female seminary, civil war.
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.
Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Emily Dickinson: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.
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