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
Genevieve Taggard
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.”
Genevieve Taggard was born on November 28, 1894, in the small farming community of Waitsburg, Washington, a place of dust-choked fields and modest wooden houses that would later stand in stark contrast to the lush paradise of her childhood memories. She died on November 8, 1948, in a New York City hospital, just shy of her fifty-fourth birthday, her body worn down by chronic hypertension that had increasingly confine…
“It is better to work hard than to be married hard.”
About 3,786 km separate Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA from Waitsburg, Washington, 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. Genevieve Taggard: waitsburg, washington, honolulu, hawaii, robert l. wolf, marcia liles, for eager lovers, hawaiian hilltop, travelling standing still, the life and mind of emily dickinson.
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. Genevieve Taggard: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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