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
Jane Austen
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…
“New talents have got to come along because they always have.”
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, into a family whose modest circumstances, intellectual liveliness, and close emotional bonds supplied the material conditions for an extraordinary literary education. She was the seventh of eight children born to the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. Her father was rector of the parishes of Steventon and Deane; her mother came from the…
“Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.”
About 5,537 km separate West End, New Jersey, USA from Steventon, Hampshire, 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.
Dorothy Parker: manhattan, algonquin hotel, jazz age, edwin pond parker ii, enough rope, sunset gun, death and taxes, vanity fair. Jane Austen: steventon, hampshire, cassandra austen, sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice, northanger abbey, tom lefroy, harris bigg-wither.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Dorothy Parker: Irony, Sorrow, Despair. Jane Austen: Irony, Sorrow, Longing.
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