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.
Robert Frost
Katharine Lee Bates
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political aspirant, a man of forceful opinions, Southern sympathies, and unstable prospects. His mother, Isabelle Mood…
“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”
Katharine Lee Bates was born on 12 August 1859 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and died on 28 March 1929 in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her name is permanently associated with “America the Beautiful,” one of the most familiar and resonant poems in United States culture. Yet the anthem has sometimes obscured the range of the woman who wrote it. Bates was not simply a patriotic versifier who happened to find a m…
“And still I would almost rather meet a new dog than a new poet.”
About 4,386 km separate San Francisco, California, USA from Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Massachusetts.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Frost: san francisco, new england, william prescott frost, isabelle moodie frost, my butterfly: an elegy, the independent, elizabeth white, mending wall. Katharine Lee Bates: falmouth, wellesley, america the beautiful, wellesley college, william bates, cornelia frances lee bates, katharine coman, the scarab.
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.
Robert Frost: Wonder, Longing, Peace. Katharine Lee Bates: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.
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