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
Myra Viola Wilds
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…
“Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.”
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…
About 6,179 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA. 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.
Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. Myra Viola Wilds: mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education.
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. Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality.
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