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.
Harold Monro
T. S. Eliot
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 heart of Georgian London, amid the tumult of a literary revolution that would reshape English poetry forever, stood a slight, melancholic figure whose contribution to modern literature far exceeded his own poetic achievements. Harold Edward Monro, born on March 14, 1879, in Brussels to Scottish parents, would become the impresario of modernism, the keeper of poetry's most famous bookshop, and a poet whose work…
“Perhaps I'm not (metrically speaking at any rate) a poet.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“It is not from rules, or by cold-blooded imitation of style, that we learn to write: we learn by imitation indeed, but by a deeper imitation than is achieved by analysis of style.”
About 7,069 km separate Brussels, Belgium from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Harold Monro: brussels, georgian poetry, the poetry review, poetry bookshop, milk for the cat, children of love, strange meetings, the earth for sale. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.
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.
Harold Monro: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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