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.
Franklin P. Adams
John Davidson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Franklin Pierce Adams, known almost everywhere in print by the compact and memorable signature “F. P. A.,” was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 15 November 1881, and died in New York City on 23 March 1960. During the first half of the twentieth century, he became one of America’s most recognizable newspaper humorists, a poet of urbane light verse, an editor, anthologist, critic, and central presence in the literary soci…
“Christmas is over and Business is Business.”
John Davidson was born on 11 April 1857 in Barrhead, Renfrewshire, and died on 23 March 1909, or shortly thereafter, in the waters off Penzance, Cornwall. He was a Scottish poet, playwright, novelist, critic, journalist, and tireless literary experimenter whose work stands at a crucial threshold in British writing. In temperament and technique, he belonged neither wholly to the late Victorians nor wholly to the moder…
“I never see anyone. I am not like other men. People ought to think of these things.”
About 5,893 km separate Chicago, Illinois, USA from Paisley, Scotland. 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.
Franklin P. Adams: chicago, new york city, f. p. a., baseball's sad lexicon, the conning tower, algonquin round table, in cupid's court, tobogganing on parnassus. John Davidson: barrhead, renfrewshire, penzance, alexander davidson, margaret mcarthur, in a music hall and other poems, fleet street eclogues, thirty bob a week.
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.
Franklin P. Adams: Irony, Longing, Sorrow. John Davidson: Spirituality, Wonder, Anger.
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