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.
James Stephens
Stephen Phillips
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
James Stephens, born on 2 February 1882 and dead on 26 December 1950, occupies an unusual and still slightly elusive place in Irish literature. He was a poet, novelist, storyteller, essayist, translator, broadcaster, and tireless performer of his own work; he belonged to the generation of the Irish Literary Revival, yet he never fitted comfortably into the movement’s principal categories. He was not, like W. B. Yeats…
“The poet is a person who is always in love with something.”
Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…
About 380 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Summertown, Oxford, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
James Stephens: irish literary revival, the crock of gold, reincarnations, the snare, george russell, insurrections, meath protestant industrial school, philosophical argument. Stephen Phillips: summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival.
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.
James Stephens: Longing, Wonder, Peace. Stephen Phillips: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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