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.
Gabriele D'Annunzio
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.
On March 12, 1863, in the coastal city of Pescara in the Abruzzi region of Italy, a child was born who would come to embody the restless, turbulent spirit of his age like no other writer of his generation. Baptized Gaetano, he would forever be known by the name his family gave him in childhood—Gabriele—a name that seemed to foreshadow the angelic, almost otherworldly presence he would project throughout his life. Gab…
“Memento audere semper.”
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…
“Not only the cry but the gesture and the accent—and so one goes on—calling up witnesses to the real thing!”
About 1,475 km separate Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy 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.
Gabriele D'Annunzio: pescara, abruzzi, maria hardouin di gallese, eleonora duse, il piacere, canto novo, laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi, alcyone. 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. The poets sit far apart; some of the poems do not.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Gabriele D'Annunzio: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing. Charlotte Mew: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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