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.
Elinor Wylie
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“I have never published anything—never tried to, until the last few weeks.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“It is worth many dollars to any one who will live its philosophy.”
About 1,204 km separate Somerville, New Jersey, USA from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, USA. Both have ground in New York City and New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Elinor Wylie: somerville, new jersey, nets to catch the wind, velvet shoes, wild peaches, black armour, horace wylie, philip hichborn. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.
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.
Elinor Wylie: Wonder, Irony, Joy. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.
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