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
Yone Noguchi
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.”
In the annals of literary history, few figures occupy as singular a position as Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who dared to write primarily in English during an era when such a choice seemed almost inconceivable. Born Yonejiro Noguchi on December 8, 1875, in the coastal town of Tsushima near Nagoya, Japan, he would become a pioneering voice in cross-cultural literature, a man who walked between East and West with rema…
“The noisy time has slipped away even gracefully at Kyoto.”
About 10,723 km separate Dixon, Kentucky, USA from Tsushima, Aichi, Japan. 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.
Cale Young Rice: dixon, kentucky, alice hegan rice, from dusk to dusk, many gods, a night in avignon, nirvana days, cumberland university, harvard university. Yone Noguchi: tsushima, nagoya, keio university, joaquin miller, seen and unseen, the american diary of a japanese girl, from the eastern sea, the pilgrimage.
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. Yone Noguchi: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.
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