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.
Hilda Doolittle
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.
Hilda Doolittle, who published almost all her work as H.D., was born on 10 September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died on 27 September 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland. Few modern writers have so thoroughly transformed apparent limitation into artistic amplitude. The initials by which she became famous could seem austere, even impersonal: a pair of letters fit for the clean, compressed poems associated with Imagis…
“There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want.”
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…
“If known authorship discounts the term folk-poetry, then the poetry of the American Indian is not folk-poetry.”
About 1,286 km separate Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 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.
Hilda Doolittle: bethlehem, pennsylvania, ezra pound, imagism, sea garden, ocean imagery, greek mythology, richard aldington, bryn mawr college. 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.
Hilda Doolittle: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.
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