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…
“Good Keeping is a first essential in all good writing, and especially in poetry.”
Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Women Poets
They overlapped for 51 years (1880–1930).
When Myra Viola Wilds was born, Robert Bridges was about 36.
Myra Viola Wilds was about 50 when Robert Bridges died.
About 6,528 km separate
Walmer, Kent, England from
Mount Ollie, Kentucky, 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.
Myra Viola Wilds:
mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education.
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.
