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.
Helen Hoyt
James Weldon Johnson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Helen Hoyt, born on 22 January 1887 in Norwalk, Connecticut, and dead on 2 August 1972, belonged to the generation of American poets that came of age just as literary modernism was remaking the possibilities of verse. She was a poet, editor, anthologist, and perceptive advocate for new writing, yet her name has often remained at the edges of accounts dominated by more famous contemporaries. That relative obscurity ca…
“If only she is able to be sincere enough; and rather brave!”
James Weldon Johnson entered the world on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, a bustling port city where the St. Johns River met the Atlantic and where the scars of Reconstruction still lingered in the humid air. He left it on June 26, 1938, in a car accident near Wiscasset, Maine, at the age of sixty-seven, his body laid to rest in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Between those dates stretched a life of astonish…
“The Negro's greatest contribution to American civilization has been in the field of music.”
About 1,411 km separate Norwalk, Connecticut, USA from Jacksonville, Florida, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Helen Hoyt: norwalk, connecticut, barnard college, poems of amis, the name of a rose, others for 1919, harriet monroe, william carlos williams. James Weldon Johnson: jacksonville, florida, harlem renaissance, lift ev'ry voice and sing, grace nail, the autobiography of an ex-colored man, fifty years and other poems, the book of american negro poetry, god's trombones.
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.
Helen Hoyt: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality. James Weldon Johnson: Sorrow, Wonder, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.