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.
Marianne Moore
Thomas Moore
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Marianne Craig Moore emerged from the American Modernist movement as one of its most distinctive and enigmatic voices, a poet whose meticulous attention to detail and refusal to conform to conventional poetic forms revolutionized twentieth-century verse. Born on November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, and passing away on February 5, 1972, in New York City, Moore lived through nearly the entire span of modern Americ…
“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”
Thomas Moore, born in Dublin on 28 May 1779 and dead at Sloperton Cottage, Wiltshire, on 25 February 1852, occupied an unusual and influential place in the literary culture of the nineteenth century. He was at once a poet, lyricist, singer, editor, biographer, satirist, traveller, social performer, and public Irishman in an age when Irish identity could be politically dangerous, commercially useful, emotionally charg…
“The Tory, of course, is shocked by my Whiggism; the Whigs are rather displeased at my candour in conceding that they have sometimes been wrong, and the Tories right.”
About 6,313 km separate Kirkwood, Missouri, USA from Dublin, Ireland. 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.
Marianne Moore: kirkwood missouri, new york city, h.d., bryn mawr college, observations, the fish, the pangolin, poetry. Thomas Moore: sloperton cottage, irish melodies, the minstrel boy, the last rose of summer, believe me, if all those endearing young charms, trinity college dublin, samuel whyte, prince of wales.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Marianne Moore: Wonder, Peace, Sorrow. Thomas Moore: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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