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
George Sterling
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…
“We must ask a finer sincerity than that to fact.”
George Sterling was born on 1 December 1869 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, and died on 17 November 1926 in San Francisco, California. During his lifetime he was celebrated, often extravagantly, as the foremost poet of the American Pacific Coast: a writer of redwood groves, desert immensities, sea fog, cosmic fire, erotic dream, and supernatural terror. His reputation later suffered a dramatic eclipse. The rich…
About 1,379 km separate Dixon, Kentucky, USA from Sag Harbor, New York, USA. Both have ground in California.
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. George Sterling: sag harbor, san francisco, the testimony of the suns, a wine of wizardry, ambrose bierce, jack london, bohemian club, california poet.
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. George Sterling: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness.
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