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.
WIlliam Collins
Yosa Buson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Collins, born in Chichester on 25 December 1721 and dead there on 12 June 1759, occupies a small but luminous space in English literary history. He published little, lived only thirty-seven years, and spent much of his adult life under the shadow of debt, disappointment, and severe mental distress. Yet a handful of poems, especially the odes issued in 1746, have secured him a place among the most distinctive…
“I have but one book, but that is the best.”
Yosa Buson, born in 1716 and dead on 17 January 1784, occupies a singular place in Japanese culture: he was at once one of the supreme masters of haiku, a major painter of the Edo period, an editor and teacher, a student of literary history, and a deliberate maker of artistic personae. Along with Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, he is regularly named among the three greatest poets of the classical haiku tradition. Su…
“Haikai values the use of common language yet departing from the common. To depart from the common while still using the common: the method of departure from the common is most difficult.”
About 9,585 km separate Chichester, West Sussex, England from Kema, Settsu Province, Japan. 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.
WIlliam Collins: chichester, joseph warton, odes on several descriptive and allegoric subjects, ode to evening, ode to pity, ode to fear, ode to simplicity, ode to liberty. Yosa Buson: settsu province, kema, tokugawa shogunate, matsuo bashō, kobayashi issa, hayano hajin, bunjin, nanga.
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.
WIlliam Collins: Sorrow, Spirituality, Tenderness. Yosa Buson: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.
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