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.
William Rose Benét
Charlotte Mew
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Rose Benét was born on 2 February 1886 at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 4 May 1950 in New York City. During his lifetime he became known as a poet, editor, critic, anthologist, essayist, novelist in verse, and tireless popularizer of literature. He belonged to a family unusually rich in literary talent: his younger brother was the poet and novelist Stephen Vincent Benét, author of John Brow…
“If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her.”
Charlotte Mew, born Charlotte Mary Mew on 15 November 1869 and dead on 24 March 1928, occupies a singular and often haunting position in English poetry. She was admired in her own lifetime by writers as different as Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ezra Pound, yet her name later slipped from general literary view before being powerfully recovered by feminist, queer, and modernis…
“Religion is like music, one must have an ear for it. Some people have none at all.”
About 5,579 km separate Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York, USA from London, 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.
William Rose Benét: fort hamilton, brooklyn, stephen vincent benét, merchants from cathay, perpetual light, the skater of ghost lake, the great white wall, the burglar of the zodiac. Charlotte Mew: london, thomas hardy, virginia woolf, the farmer's bride, the yellow book, bloomsbury, siegfried sassoon, ezra pound.
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.
William Rose Benét: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Charlotte Mew: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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