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.
Mark Van Doren
Elizabeth Stoddard
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Mark Van Doren came into the world on June 13, 1894, in the small farming community of Hope, Illinois, the fourth of five sons born to Dr. Charles Lucius Van Doren, a dedicated country doctor of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Eudora Ann Butz, a woman of formidable spirit who had once delivered mail on horseback across the open prairies. The Van Doren household pulsed with the rhythms of rural life—plowing fields, tendi…
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”
On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea shaped daily existence and where salt spray and shipbuilding defined the community's character. The second…
“Nothing here to go with me into the depths of myself. The sterile landscape, the wintry wind these gray wailing waters benumb me, or rouse me to deep melancholy.”
About 1,442 km separate Hope, Illinois, USA from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, 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.
Mark Van Doren: hope, illinois, urband, carl van doren, dorothy graffe, spring thunder, jonathan gentry, a winter diary, pulitzer prize. Elizabeth Stoddard: mattapoisett, new york city, richard henry stoddard, nathaniel hawthorne, the morgesons, two men, temple house, wheaton female seminary.
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.
Mark Van Doren: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Elizabeth Stoddard: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality.
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