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.
Grace Hazard Conkling
Nora Hopper Chesson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Grace Hazard Conkling, born Grace Walcott Hazard in New York City on 7 February 1878, belonged to a generation of American women whose intellectual ambitions were increasingly supported by women’s colleges, international study, and new professional opportunities, even as marriage and motherhood still imposed demanding social expectations. She became a poet, teacher, musician, critic of children’s reading, and a forma…
“Books, the first books heard or read, are not about life; they are life.”
Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…
“We will at least eat together of the roast beef of Old England, of plum-pudding and mince-pies.”
About 5,370 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Exeter, Devon, 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.
Grace Hazard Conkling: new york city, smith college, hilda conkling, symphony of a mexican garden, wilderness songs, roscoe platt conkling, tampico, charles-marie widor. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.
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.
Grace Hazard Conkling: Wonder, Sensuality, Longing. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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