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.
John McCrae
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.
John McCrae was born on 30 November 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, then a prosperous and growing town in Canada’s province of Ontario. He died on 28 January 1918 at Wimereux, France, before the war that made his name famous had ended. In the short span between those dates, he became several things at once: physician, medical teacher, pathologist, soldier, officer, friend, and poet. To later generations he is overwhelmingly…
“It is a poem of war, and I hope it will be of some use.”
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…
About 5,775 km separate Guelph, Ontario, Canada 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.
John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital. 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.
John McCrae: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Charlotte Mew: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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