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.
Hilaire Belloc
Alice Corbin
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, near Paris, France, and died on 16 July 1953, eleven days before his eighty-third birthday. He was one of the most conspicuous, gifted, and divisive English-language writers of the first half of the twentieth century: a poet, essayist, historian, travel writer, novelist, political campaigner, Catholic apologist, journalist, and public…
“Faith is a higher faculty than reason.”
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.”
About 7,040 km separate La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France from St. Louis, Missouri, 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.
Hilaire Belloc: la celle-saint-cloud, sussex, the bad child's book of beasts, cautionary tales for children, the path to rome, elodie hogan, bessie rayner parkes, oxford union. 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.
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.
Hilaire Belloc: Sorrow, Irony, Despair. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.