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.
Rabindranath Tagore
Genevieve Taggard
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Rabindranath Tagore, born on 7 May 1861 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India, and dead on 7 August 1941 in the same city, was one of the rare writers whose life seems inseparable from the cultural history of a nation. Yet to call him merely India’s greatest modern poet is to reduce an astonishingly various career. He was a lyric poet, songwriter, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, letter wri…
“Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its grasp with a hold that kills it.”
Genevieve Taggard was born on November 28, 1894, in the small farming community of Waitsburg, Washington, a place of dust-choked fields and modest wooden houses that would later stand in stark contrast to the lush paradise of her childhood memories. She died on November 8, 1948, in a New York City hospital, just shy of her fifty-fourth birthday, her body worn down by chronic hypertension that had increasingly confine…
“Self-sufficiency is a myth, of course, but after thirty, if one is a serious-minded egoist (i.e., artist) it becomes more and more necessary.”
About 11,907 km separate Kolkata, India from Waitsburg, Washington, USA. 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.
Rabindranath Tagore: calcutta, bengal presidency, gurudev, debendranath tagore, mrinalini devi, santiniketan, manasi, sonar tari. Genevieve Taggard: waitsburg, washington, honolulu, hawaii, robert l. wolf, marcia liles, for eager lovers, hawaiian hilltop, travelling standing still, the life and mind of emily dickinson.
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.
Rabindranath Tagore: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder. Genevieve Taggard: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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