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.”
Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
They overlapped for 29 years (1934–1962).
When Elizabeth Devereux was born, Richard Aldington was about 42.
Elizabeth Devereux was about 28 when Richard Aldington died.
About 10,923 km separate
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from
Singapore.
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.
Elizabeth Devereux:
singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement.
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.
