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 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.”
Marsden Hartley stands as one of the most fascinating yet often overlooked figures in American modernism—a man who moved between painting and poetry with equal fervor, whose work captured the raw, untamed spirit of early twentieth-century artistic experimentation. Though primarily remembered as a visual artist, Hartley's literary output reveals a sensibility equally attuned to the power of words as to the force of co…
“The loneliest place in the world is the human heart.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
They overlapped for 52 years (1892–1943).
When Richard Aldington was born, Marsden Hartley was about 15.
Richard Aldington was about 51 when Marsden Hartley died.
About 5,062 km separate
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from
Lewiston, Maine, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Richard Aldington:
portsmouth, ezra pound, h.d., imagist movement, evening, the poplar, images of war, bombardment.
Marsden Hartley:
lewiston, maine, cleveland school of art, william merritt chase, alfred stieglitz, war motif series, karl von freyburg, twenty-five poems, androscoggin.
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.
