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.
Katherine Philips, born Katherine Fowler on 1 January 1632 and dead at only thirty-two on 22 June 1664, achieved a distinction that would have seemed improbable in the unsettled England of her youth: she became a celebrated poet while she was still alive, and she did so as a woman writing in forms and subjects conventionally claimed by men. Known to her readers and friends as “Orinda,” Philips fashioned poems of frie…
“I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof; especially when the Person our Friend marries has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment. We may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship.”
Neighbourhood:
LGBTQ+ Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Anne Knish, credited in some accounts with the dates 1916–1917, was not a historical poet in the ordinary biographical sense. She had no childhood, family, home town, education, intimate correspondence, or grave. Rather, she was a deliberately invented literary identity, one of the central masks in the Spectra hoax, a remarkable episode in American poetry during the first years of modernism. The name “Anne Knish” bel…
About 5,570 km separate
London, England from
New York City, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Katherine Philips:
orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars.
Anne Knish:
spectra hoax, arthur davison ficke, witter bynner, davenport, iowa, hudson, new york, spectrism, opus 76, free verse.
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.
