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 American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still finding its literary voice and dying in an America confidently asserting its cultural sophistication, A…
“The color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its affinities.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
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.”
They overlapped for 16 years (1892–1907).
When Richard Aldington was born, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was about 56.
Richard Aldington was about 15 when Thomas Bailey Aldrich died.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich:
portsmouth, new hampshire, new orleans, lilian woodman, the bells: a collection of chimes, the ballad of babie bell, shiloh: a requiem, the story of a bad boy, james russell lowell.
Richard Aldington:
portsmouth, ezra pound, h.d., imagist movement, evening, the poplar, images of war, bombardment.
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.
