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.
Adelaide Crapsey
Lizette Woodworth Reese
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“It is brief, but it has taken a long time.”
Lizette Woodworth Reese was born on 9 January 1856 in the Greenspring Valley area of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on 17 December 1935. Her long life joined two very different literary ages. She was formed by the cadences, moral seriousness, and cultivated sentiment of nineteenth-century verse, yet some of her finest poems possess the compression, pictorial clarity, and emotional reserve that late…
“None of us ever escape the first few years of our lives. They make a mould into which we are cast, and though it may be broken, and we turned loose, some remnant of it, some intangible evil or lovely thing or both, will remain with us, like the odor to a flower, or the smoothness to a piece of ivory. It is part of the immortality of youth.”
About 573 km separate Saranac Lake, New York, USA from Greenspring, Baltimore County, Maryland, 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.
Adelaide Crapsey: saranac lake, cinquain, imagist poetry, algernon sidney crapsey, vassar college, smith college, november night, the warning. Lizette Woodworth Reese: baltimore, greenspring valley, david reese, mary elizabeth woodworth reese, a branch of may, tears, a handful of lavender, a quiet road.
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.
Adelaide Crapsey: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder. Lizette Woodworth Reese: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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