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.
Dorothy Parker
Alice Corbin
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on 22 August 1893 and dead on 7 June 1967, became one of the most recognizable voices of twentieth-century American letters: a poet of compressed heartbreak, a theater and book critic of dangerous precision, a short-story writer of unusual psychological acuity, a screenwriter, and a public political dissenter. For much of her life, she was treated as the emblem of a particular…
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…
“It may be that the folk-spirit is a necessary sub-soil for any fine national poetic flowering.”
About 1,400 km separate West End, New Jersey, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, 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.
Dorothy Parker: manhattan, algonquin hotel, jazz age, edwin pond parker ii, enough rope, sunset gun, death and taxes, vanity fair. Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism.
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.
Dorothy Parker: Irony, Sorrow, Despair. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.