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.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Witter Bynner
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, born Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida on February 17, 1836, in Seville, and dead in Madrid on December 22, 1870, became one of the most beloved and influential voices in Spanish poetry despite publishing no definitive collection of his poems during his lifetime. His reputation rests chiefly on the Rimas, brief lyric poems of extraordinary intimacy, and the Leyendas, prose tales in whic…
“Religion is love, and because it is love, it is poetry.”
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“I had come to feel that poetic literature must contain streams from one or the other of these two sources: the Greek and the Hebrew.”
About 5,731 km separate Seville, Andalusia, Spain from Brooklyn, New York, USA. 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.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: seville, madrid, rimas, leyendas, valeriano bécquer, jose domínguez insausti, manuela monahay, narciso campillo. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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