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.
Cale Young Rice
John Crowe Ransom
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Cale Young Rice was born on 7 December 1872 in Dixon, Kentucky, and died on 24 January 1943 in Louisville, Kentucky. During his lifetime he was a conspicuous, if never wholly central, figure in American letters: a poet of formal accomplishment, a playwright attracted to historical spectacle and moral conflict, a lecturer, traveler, and public literary presence. In the decades around 1900, when American poetry stood b…
“Yet the romanticist would seem to have the better theoretical viewpoint.”
John Crowe Ransom stood at the crossroads of American poetry and criticism in the twentieth century, a figure whose influence extended far beyond the elegant verses he composed. Born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee, he would become the architect of a critical revolution, the mentor to some of America's finest poets, and the principal voice of a distinctly Southern literary aesthetic that sought to reconcile…
“English might almost as well announce that it does not regard itself as entirely autonomous, but as a branch of the department of history.”
About 264 km separate Dixon, Kentucky, USA from Pulaski, Tennessee, 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.
Cale Young Rice: dixon, kentucky, alice hegan rice, from dusk to dusk, many gods, a night in avignon, nirvana days, cumberland university, harvard university. John Crowe Ransom: pulaski, tennessee, john james ransom, ella crowe ransom, vanderbilt university, fugitive group, the fugitive, allen tate, robert penn warren.
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.
Cale Young Rice: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. John Crowe Ransom: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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