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
Edna Wahlert McCourt
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…
“Through Sigurd our circle of fellowship was widened for all time.”
Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…
“The effort he made to arouse that crude crowd to patriotic response was magnificent.”
About 2,888 km separate Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA from Denver, Colorado, 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. Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine.
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. Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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