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.
Lola Ridge
Edna Wahlert McCourt
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Lola Ridge stands as a compelling and somewhat enigmatic figure in the landscape of early twentieth-century American poetry. While her name may not resonate with the same immediate recognition as her contemporaries Ezra Pound, H.D., or William Carlos Williams, her contribution to the modernist movement was profound, particularly in her fusion of avant-garde aesthetics with unflinching social realism. Born on December…
“Woman is not and never has been man's natural inferior.”
Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…
“There was rumor of much that he might have told—months in the thick of the fight; shrapnel wounds; and, during convalescence, heroic defense of a church, hallowed by the Red Cross and bombarded by the enemy.”
About 7,082 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Denver, Colorado, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Lola Ridge: greenwich village, the ghetto, red flag, sun-up and other poems, david lyman, the little review, margaret anderson, social realism. Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine.
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.
Lola Ridge: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.