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 Seymour Bridges was born on 23 October 1844 at Walmer, near Deal in Kent, into a prosperous and cultivated English family whose security gave him both educational opportunity and, eventually, the independence to pursue literature without needing to earn his living from it. He was the fourth son of John Thomas Bridges and Harriet Elizabeth Bridges. His father had served in the navy and later held administrative…
“Temper and sharpen it as you may, your chisel cannot cut itself. We should therefore not expect too much.”
Helen Hoyt, born on 22 January 1887 in Norwalk, Connecticut, and dead on 2 August 1972, belonged to the generation of American poets that came of age just as literary modernism was remaking the possibilities of verse. She was a poet, editor, anthologist, and perceptive advocate for new writing, yet her name has often remained at the edges of accounts dominated by more famous contemporaries. That relative obscurity ca…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
About 5,614 km separate
Walmer, Kent, England from
Norwalk, Connecticut, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Robert Bridges:
walmer, eton college, corpus christi college, gerard manley hopkins, the growth of love, london snow, st bartholomew's hospital, hospital for sick children.
Helen Hoyt:
norwalk, connecticut, barnard college, poems of amis, the name of a rose, others for 1919, harriet monroe, william carlos williams.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
