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, 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…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
In the long history of American literary scholarship, few figures embody the transition from nineteenth-century genteel letters to modern academic criticism as thoroughly as Henry Augustin Beers. Born on July 2, 1847, in Buffalo, New York, and dying on September 7, 1926, in New Haven, Connecticut, Beers spent nearly his entire adult life at Yale University, where his slight frame became a beloved fixture on campus fo…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 49 years (1878–1926).
When Grace Hazard Conkling was born, Henry Augustin Beers was about 31.
Grace Hazard Conkling was about 48 when Henry Augustin Beers died.
Grace Hazard Conkling:
new york city, smith college, hilda conkling, symphony of a mexican garden, wilderness songs, roscoe platt conkling, tampico, charles-marie widor.
Henry Augustin Beers:
buffalo, new york, new haven, connecticut, yale university, mary florence heaton, james russell lowell, ralph waldo emerson, odds and ends, a century of american literature.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.