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
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and died on 19 October 1950 at her home in Austerlitz, New York. During her lifetime she became one of the most visible and commercially successful poets in the United States: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a celebrated public reader, a playwright, a lyricist, a political writer, and an emblem of the modern, sexually independent “New Woman.” Her fame…
“The poet is not a man who says what he thinks, but a man who says what he feels.”
About 551 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Rockland, Maine, USA. Both have ground in 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. Edna St. Vincent Millay: rockland, maine, austerlitz, new york, pulitzer prize, renascence, caroline b. dow, vassar college, greenwich village, a few figs from thistles.
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. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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