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.
Grace Hazard Conkling
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Grace Hazard Conkling, born Grace Walcott Hazard in New York City on 7 February 1878, belonged to a generation of American women whose intellectual ambitions were increasingly supported by women’s colleges, international study, and new professional opportunities, even as marriage and motherhood still imposed demanding social expectations. She became a poet, teacher, musician, critic of children’s reading, and a forma…
“Books, the first books heard or read, are not about life; they are life.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“Wise is the mother, and as sure as wise, who teaches her child to finish each task begun before attempting another.”
About 1,249 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, USA. Both have ground in New York City and New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Grace Hazard Conkling: new york city, smith college, hilda conkling, symphony of a mexican garden, wilderness songs, roscoe platt conkling, tampico, charles-marie widor. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.
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.
Grace Hazard Conkling: Wonder, Sensuality, Longing. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.
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