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.
Bliss Carman
W. H. Davies
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Bliss Carman, known throughout his literary life as Bliss Carman, was born on 15 April 1861 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and died on 8 June 1929 in New Canaan, Connecticut. For several decades around the turn of the twentieth century, he was among the most widely read poets associated with Canada. He enjoyed an international reputation unusual for a Canadian writer of his generation, published extensively i…
“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“It was written on the advice of friends who claimed my life of adventure would have an interest for the public.”
About 4,558 km separate Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada from Newport, Wales. 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.
Bliss Carman: fredericton, new brunswick, low tide on grand pré, songs from vagabondia, richard hovey, sappho: one hundred lyrics, the joys of the road, mary perry king. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.
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.
Bliss Carman: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.
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