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
Robert Nichols
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.”
In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“We are so impressed by the power of poetry that we think of it as something made by a wonderful and unusual person: we do not realize that all the wonder and marvel is in our own brains, that the poet is ourselves.”
About 6,754 km separate Kirkwood, Missouri, USA from Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England. 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. Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets.
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.
Marianne Moore: Wonder, Peace, Sorrow. Robert Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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