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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Fenton Johnson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on 27 June 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, and died there on 9 February 1906, only thirty-three years later. In that brief life he became one of the most accomplished and consequential American writers of his generation: a poet of extraordinary musical discipline, a novelist and short-story writer, a public reader, a lyricist, and, in many ways, the first African American author to achieve a broad…
“I am nearer discouraged than I have ever yet been.”
In the sunlit streets of late-19th-century Chicago, where the Great Lakes breezes carried the promise of industry and the distant echoes of Southern migrations, Fenton Johnson entered the world on May 7, 1888. He would leave it on September 17, 1958, in the same city that had cradled his ambitions and tested his spirit, his seventy years a testament to the restless genius of an artist who refused to be confined by th…
About 373 km separate Dayton, Ohio, USA from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: dayton ohio, joshua dunbar, matilda murphy dunbar, oak and ivy, majors and minors, lyrics of lowly life, we wear the mask, sympathy. Fenton Johnson: chicago, harlem renaissance, elijah johnson, jesse taylor johnson, a little dreaming, visions of the dusk, songs of the soil, tired.
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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Fenton Johnson: Sorrow, Despair, Peace.
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