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.
Amy Lowell
Gertrude Stein
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Amy Lawrence Lowell emerged from the staid drawing rooms of Boston's Brahmin society to become one of the most controversial and influential poets of early twentieth-century America. Born on February 9, 1874, into one of New England's most distinguished families, she would spend her fifty-one years challenging literary conventions, championing new poetic forms, and leaving an indelible mark on American literature. He…
“The poet must be able to see beauty in the commonplace.”
Gertrude Stein was born on 3 February 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then a separate city and now part of Pittsburgh, and died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Few modern writers have made language itself so central to the drama of literature. Stein was a novelist, poet, playwright, critic, lecturer, collector, salon host, memoirist, and commanding public personality. She was also, in collaboration…
“There is no there there.”
About 776 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 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.
Amy Lowell: boston, imagist movement, ada dwyer russell, sword blades and poppy seed, patterns, the taxi, can grande's castle, tendencies in modern american poetry. Gertrude Stein: allegheny, pittsburgh, neuilly-sur-seine, alice b. toklas, three lives, tender buttons, the making of americans, harvard annex.
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.
Amy Lowell: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Gertrude Stein: Wonder, Irony, Tenderness.
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