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.
Wilfred Owen
Edwin J. Ellis
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…
“I hate washy pacifists as temperamentally as I hate whiskied prussianists.”
Edwin John Ellis, born in London on 20 May 1848 and dead in 1916, belongs to that large but consequential company of late-Victorian writers whose names have faded while the movements, friendships, and acts of interpretation in which they participated remain central to literary history. He was a poet, painter, critic, editor, and imaginative theorist: a figure drawn to symbolism, myth, spiritual aspiration, and the af…
About 250 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. Edwin J. Ellis: london, w. b. yeats, william blake, the works of william blake, seen in three days, fate in arcadia, pre-raphaelite movement, celtic 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.
Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Edwin J. Ellis: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness.
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