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.
Gertrude Stein
Amy Levy
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Gertrude Stein was born on 3 February 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then a separate city and now part of Pittsburgh, and died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Few modern writers have made language itself so central to the drama of literature. Stein was a novelist, poet, playwright, critic, lecturer, collector, salon host, memoirist, and commanding public personality. She was also, in collaboration…
“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
Amy Judith Levy was born in Clapham, south London, on 10 November 1861, and died in London on 10 September 1889. In fewer than twenty-eight years she became one of the most distinctive writers of the late Victorian period: a poet of compressed feeling and formal intelligence, a novelist of urban and communal life, an essayist alert to women’s changing circumstances, and a figure of unusual importance in the histories…
“The poetry of Christina Rossetti is essentially the poetry of a woman.”
About 5,981 km separate Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA from Clapham, London, 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.
Gertrude Stein: allegheny, pittsburgh, neuilly-sur-seine, alice b. toklas, three lives, tender buttons, the making of americans, harvard annex. Amy Levy: clapham, anglo-jewish writing, feminist literature, queer literary culture, xantippe and other verse, a minor poet and other verse, newnham college, the romance of a shop.
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.
Gertrude Stein: Wonder, Irony, Tenderness. Amy Levy: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.