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.
Joyce Kilmer
Laurence Binyon
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Alfred Joyce Kilmer was born on 6 December 1886 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, into a household in which intellectual seriousness and artistic feeling were not opposites but companion forces. His father, Frederick Barnett Kilmer, was a physician, analytical chemist, and later a leading scientific figure at Johnson & Johnson; his work helped establish standards for pharmaceutical and consumer-health products in an era…
“The Catholic Church is the only thing that makes life worth living.”
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“No interpretation can really give what the art itself alone can yield—its live, essential breath.”
About 5,362 km separate New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA from Lancaster, England. 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.
Joyce Kilmer: new brunswick, new jersey, aline murray, trees, roman catholicism, poetry society of america, columbia university, summer of love. Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon.
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.
Joyce Kilmer: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.
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