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.
Elinor Wylie
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“I have never published anything—never tried to, until the last few weeks.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and died on 19 October 1950 at her home in Austerlitz, New York. During her lifetime she became one of the most visible and commercially successful poets in the United States: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a celebrated public reader, a playwright, a lyricist, a political writer, and an emblem of the modern, sexually independent “New Woman.” Her fame…
“Life isn't one damn thing after another. It's the same damn thing again and again.”
About 599 km separate Somerville, New Jersey, USA from Rockland, Maine, USA. Both have ground in New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Elinor Wylie: somerville, new jersey, nets to catch the wind, velvet shoes, wild peaches, black armour, horace wylie, philip hichborn. Edna St. Vincent Millay: rockland, maine, austerlitz, new york, pulitzer prize, renascence, caroline b. dow, vassar college, greenwich village, a few figs from thistles.
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.
Elinor Wylie: Wonder, Irony, Joy. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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