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.
Ernst Stadler
Edith M. Thomas
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Ernst Stadler was born on 11 August 1883 in Colmar, in Alsace, and was killed on 30 October 1914 near Zandvoorde in Flanders during the First World War. His life lasted little more than thirty-one years, and the body of poetry on which his reputation rests is correspondingly small. Yet his importance in German-language literature is out of proportion to its size. Stadler stands among the decisive early voices of Expr…
“My standpoint has changed in many ways here — I think I may say: broadened.”
Edith Matilda Thomas was born on 12 August 1854 in Chatham, Ohio, and died on 13 September 1925 in New York City. During her lifetime she was admired as one of the most accomplished American lyric poets of the late nineteenth century, praised by editors, fellow writers, and readers for verse that joined close observation of nature to emotional reserve, formal intelligence, and a searching spiritual imagination. Yet s…
“Throughout the winter, nature's active and crescent principle seems never held wholly in abeyance.”
About 6,807 km separate Colmar, Alsace, France from Chatham, Ohio, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Ernst Stadler: colmar, alsace, first world war, der aufbruch, expressionism, oxford, walt whitman, strasbourg. Edith M. Thomas: chatham, ohio, new york city, helen hunt jackson, a new year's masque, the inverted torch, lyrics and sonnets, northeastern ohio, romantic poetry.
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.
Ernst Stadler: Longing, Fear, Sensuality. Edith M. Thomas: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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