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.
John Drinkwater
Violet Fane
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…
“By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.”
In the grand tapestry of Victorian literature, where convention often stifled authentic expression, Mary Montgomerie, Lady Currie (née Lamb, 24 February 1843 – 13 October 1905), known by the literary pseudonym Violet Fane, was an English poet, writer, and later an ambassadress who dared to weave threads of passion, heartbreak, and feminine desire into her verse. Her life, spanning over six decades of the nineteenth c…
About 92 km separate Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex from Littlehampton, Sussex, England. Both have ground in England and London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander. Violet Fane: beauport, littlehampton, victorian literature, from dawn to noon, betwixt two seas, autumn songs, benjamin disraeli, vivian grey.
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.
John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Violet Fane: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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