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.
Carl Sandburg
Arthur Rimbaud
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Carl Sandburg, born 6 January 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, and dead 22 July 1967 in Flat Rock, North Carolina, became one of the most recognizable American writers of the twentieth century: a poet of factories and prairies, a journalist of civic life, a collector and performer of folk songs, a novelist and children’s writer, and the immensely popular biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Few writers worked so deliberately t…
“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.”
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, and died on 10 November 1891 in Marseille. Few writers have produced so small a body of work and so immense a legend. Rimbaud wrote nearly all the poetry for which he is remembered between his mid-teens and about twenty, then turned away from literature with an apparent decisiveness that has fascinat…
“I cannot make a step outside my stretcher; my knee swelled before my eyes and the pain kept increasing.”
About 6,982 km separate Galesburg, Illinois, USA from Charleville, Ardennes, France. 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.
Carl Sandburg: galesburg, flat rock, abraham lincoln, chicago, lillian steichen, chicago poems, cornhuskers, smoke and steel. Arthur Rimbaud: charleville, marseille, franco-prussian war, paul verlaine, madame rimbaud, les étrennes des orphelins, le dormeur du val, le bateau ivre.
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.
Carl Sandburg: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Arthur Rimbaud: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.
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