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.
Robert Nichols
Richard Aldington
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 pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“You can't even think of paradise when you're in hell.”
In the tumultuous landscape of early twentieth-century literature, few figures embodied the era's contradictions and transformations as completely as Richard Aldington. Born Edward Godfree Aldington on July 8, 1892, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, he would emerge as one of the founding voices of literary modernism, only to spend his later years railing against the very movement he helped create. His life trajectory—from pr…
“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”
About 27 km separate Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England from Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets. Richard Aldington: portsmouth, ezra pound, h.d., imagist movement, evening, the poplar, images of war, bombardment.
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.
Robert Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Richard Aldington: Peace, Sorrow, Despair.
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