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.
Hilda Doolittle
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.
Hilda Doolittle, who published almost all her work as H.D., was born on 10 September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died on 27 September 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland. Few modern writers have so thoroughly transformed apparent limitation into artistic amplitude. The initials by which she became famous could seem austere, even impersonal: a pair of letters fit for the clean, compressed poems associated with Imagis…
“Memory is the mother, begetter of all drama, idea, music, science or song.”
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…
About 3,467 km separate Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 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.
Hilda Doolittle: bethlehem, pennsylvania, ezra pound, imagism, sea garden, ocean imagery, greek mythology, richard aldington, bryn mawr college. 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.
Hilda Doolittle: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing. Genevieve Taggard: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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