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.
Maxwell Bodenheim
E. Nesbit
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Maxwell Bodenheim's life reads like one of his own feverish poems—raw, defiant, laced with startling imagery, and shadowed by a restless hunger for freedom that both illuminated and destroyed him. Born into the humid anonymity of a small Southern town, he rose to become the self-crowned King of Greenwich Village bohemians during the glittering, gin-soaked Jazz Age, only to tumble into poverty, ridicule, and a violent…
“I was born without your talent for bootlicking.”
Edith Nesbit, who published most often as E. Nesbit, was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, then part of Surrey and now within south London. She died on 4 May 1924 at New Romney, Kent. In the years between those dates she became one of the most inventive writers for children in English, an accomplished poet, a novelist of adult life, a writer of ghost stories and social comedy, a social…
“Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.”
About 7,340 km separate Hermanville, Mississippi, USA from Kennington, Surrey, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Maxwell Bodenheim: hermanville, greenwich village, jazz age, minna and myself, ben hecht, chicago renaissance, others anthology, the shop. E. Nesbit: kennington, new romney, hubert bland, the railway children, five children and it, the story of the treasure seekers, fabian society, songs of love and empire.
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.
Maxwell Bodenheim: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. E. Nesbit: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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