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.
Charlotte Mew
Louise Chandler Moulton
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“I'm burning up my work. I don't know what else to do with it.”
In the quiet Connecticut countryside of Pomfret, on April 10, 1835, a child was born who would become one of the most influential literary figures of the late nineteenth century, though her name today is less remembered than the glittering circle of writers and artists she championed. Ellen Louise Chandler, who would later be known to the literary world as Louise Chandler Moulton, emerged from circumstances that seem…
“I was lonely, and I sought companions. What was there to do but to create them?”
About 5,355 km separate London, England from Pomfret, Connecticut, USA. 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.
Charlotte Mew: london, thomas hardy, virginia woolf, the farmer's bride, the yellow book, bloomsbury, siegfried sassoon, ezra pound. Louise Chandler Moulton: pomfret connecticut, william upham moulton, this that and the other, may-flowers, bed-time stories, boston literary salon, james mcneill whistler, edmund clarence stedman.
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.
Charlotte Mew: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Louise Chandler Moulton: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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