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.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
John McCrae
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, born on 17 August 1840 at Petworth in Sussex and dead on 10 September 1922 at Newbuildings Place, his Sussex home, lived a life unusually crowded with contradiction. He was an English gentleman who became one of Victorian Britain’s most persistent critics of empire; a formal, often old-fashioned poet who sought to make verse answer political injustice; a diplomat who abandoned official service i…
“All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if man could be shut out.”
John McCrae was born on 30 November 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, then a prosperous and growing town in Canada’s province of Ontario. He died on 28 January 1918 at Wimereux, France, before the war that made his name famous had ended. In the short span between those dates, he became several things at once: physician, medical teacher, pathologist, soldier, officer, friend, and poet. To later generations he is overwhelmingly…
“It is a poem of war, and I hope it will be of some use.”
About 5,768 km separate Petworth House, Sussex, England from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. 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.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: petworth, newbuildings place, lady anne blunt, the bedouin tribes of the euphrates, a pilgrimage to nejd, crabbet park, arabian horse breeding, stonyhurst college. John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital.
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.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. John McCrae: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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