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.
Elinor Wylie
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“It was Horace who made a poet and scholar of me.”
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, born on 17 August 1840 at Petworth in Sussex and dead on 10 September 1922 at Newbuildings Place, his Sussex home, lived a life unusually crowded with contradiction. He was an English gentleman who became one of Victorian Britain’s most persistent critics of empire; a formal, often old-fashioned poet who sought to make verse answer political injustice; a diplomat who abandoned official service i…
“Every honest man, English or not, ought to rejoice.”
About 5,606 km separate Somerville, New Jersey, USA from Petworth House, Sussex, 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.
Elinor Wylie: somerville, new jersey, nets to catch the wind, velvet shoes, wild peaches, black armour, horace wylie, philip hichborn. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: petworth, newbuildings place, lady anne blunt, the bedouin tribes of the euphrates, a pilgrimage to nejd, crabbet park, arabian horse breeding, stonyhurst college.
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.
Elinor Wylie: Wonder, Irony, Joy. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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