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.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, when American poetry was undergoing one of its most dramatic transformations, a young man of Irish heritage was crafting verses that sought to bridge the ancient traditions of Celtic literature with the modern sensibilities of his adopted homeland. Shaemas O'Sheel, born James Shields in New York City on January 12, 1886, would become one of the more intriguing yet ultima…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets
William H. A. Moore, born about 1885 and deceased in 1960, belongs to that important but still insufficiently recovered generation of African American poets whose careers connected the literary culture of the late nineteenth century with the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance and its related movements in Chicago, Washington, and other urban centers. His surviving reputation rests on a small body of lyric poetry, sca…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
They overlapped for 69 years (1886–1954).
When Shaemas O'Sheel was born, William H. A. Moore was about 1.
William H. A. Moore was about 69 when Shaemas O'Sheel died.
Shaemas O'Sheel:
new york city, irish heritage, they went forth to battle, but they always fell, jealous of dead leaves, irish literary revival, w.b. yeats, harriet monroe, socialism.
William H. A. Moore:
new york city, dusk songs, the crisis, james weldon johnson, harlem renaissance, city college of new york, columbia university, 1919 race riot.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.