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.
Edna Wahlert McCourt
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…
“Those boys are neither fools nor leaves of an aspen, to bend to my will.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“When we declare we are brave enough to overcome any fate, we find our strength put to the test at once.”
About 1,387 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, 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.
Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.
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.
Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.
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