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.
Katharine Lee Bates
Emma Lazarus
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Katharine Lee Bates was born on 12 August 1859 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and died on 28 March 1929 in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her name is permanently associated with “America the Beautiful,” one of the most familiar and resonant poems in United States culture. Yet the anthem has sometimes obscured the range of the woman who wrote it. Bates was not simply a patriotic versifier who happened to find a m…
“Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven.”
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849 and died there on 19 November 1887, only thirty-eight years later. Her name is now inseparable from “The New Colossus,” the sonnet whose plea for the world’s “tired,” “poor,” and “huddled masses” has become the verbal companion to the Statue of Liberty. Yet the familiarity of those lines has often obscured the larger achievement of the woman who wrote them. Lazar…
“I seem to have always one little window looking out into life. No such cure for pessimism as a severe illness; the simplest pleasures are enough — to breathe the air and see the sun.”
About 299 km separate Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA from New York City, New York, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Katharine Lee Bates: falmouth, wellesley, america the beautiful, wellesley college, william bates, cornelia frances lee bates, katharine coman, the scarab. Emma Lazarus: new york city, the new colossus, moses lazarus, esther nathan, admetus and other poems, alide: an episode of goethe’s life, the spagnoletto, william cullen bryant.
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.
Katharine Lee Bates: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Emma Lazarus: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder.
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