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.
Amy Levy
A. Mary F. Robinson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Amy Judith Levy was born in Clapham, south London, on 10 November 1861, and died in London on 10 September 1889. In fewer than twenty-eight years she became one of the most distinctive writers of the late Victorian period: a poet of compressed feeling and formal intelligence, a novelist of urban and communal life, an essayist alert to women’s changing circumstances, and a figure of unusual importance in the histories…
“The poetry of Christina Rossetti is essentially the poetry of a woman.”
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, who published most often as A. Mary F. Robinson and became successively known in France as Madame Darmesteter and Madame Duclaux, was born on 27 February 1857 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and died in Aurillac, France, on 9 February 1944. Her unusually long life carried her from the high Victorian age into the Second World War; her writing career connected English Romantic and aestheti…
“Each of us also has some private niche, some inconsiderable intimate shrine, for the poet no one praises, who is all the more our own.”
About 136 km separate Clapham, London, England from Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, 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.
Amy Levy: clapham, anglo-jewish writing, feminist literature, queer literary culture, xantippe and other verse, a minor poet and other verse, newnham college, the romance of a shop. A. Mary F. Robinson: leamington spa, aurillac, madame darmesteter, madame duclaux, a handful of honeysuckle, the new arcadia, emily brontë, james darmesteter.
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.
Amy Levy: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow. A. Mary F. Robinson: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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