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
Elizabeth Devereux
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…
“I think he's great. I think lastingly great.”
Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…
About 15,379 km separate West End, New Jersey, USA from Singapore. 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.
Dorothy Parker: manhattan, algonquin hotel, jazz age, edwin pond parker ii, enough rope, sunset gun, death and taxes, vanity fair. Elizabeth Devereux: singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement.
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. Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.