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.
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…
“He speaks our language better than we do merely because he is more skilful with it than we are; his skill is part of our skill, his power of our power.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Jessie Pope was born on 18 March 1868 in Leicester, England, and died on 14 December 1941, during the second year of another world war. She is remembered chiefly, and controversially, as one of the most conspicuous popular poets of British patriotic verse during the First World War. Yet to reduce her entirely to the recruitment poems that later generations have found disturbing is to overlook the long, energetic, and…
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.
Jessie Pope:
leicester, first world war, who's for the game?, the call, joseph pope, paper pellets, airy nothings, punch.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
