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.
Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
Cale Young Rice
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, known in much of the world as Rumi, was born on 30 September 1207 and died on 17 December 1273. Few poets have crossed linguistic, religious, and national boundaries as fully as he has. In Persian literary history he is often called Mawlānā, “our master,” and in the Turkish-speaking world he is remembered as Mevlânâ; “Rumi,” the name by which he is most familiar in English, means…
“One certainty is better than a hundred doubts.”
Cale Young Rice was born on 7 December 1872 in Dixon, Kentucky, and died on 24 January 1943 in Louisville, Kentucky. During his lifetime he was a conspicuous, if never wholly central, figure in American letters: a poet of formal accomplishment, a playwright attracted to historical spectacle and moral conflict, a lecturer, traveler, and public literary presence. In the decades around 1900, when American poetry stood b…
“To the experienced these new "isms" are but aspects of a general and unrestrained reaction toward realism.”
About 11,352 km separate Balkh, Afghanistan from Dixon, Kentucky, 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.
Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī: balkh, khorasan, shams-i tabrizi, divan-i shams-i tabrizi, masnavi, seljuk sultanate of rūm, gawhar khātūn, sulṭān walad. Cale Young Rice: dixon, kentucky, alice hegan rice, from dusk to dusk, many gods, a night in avignon, nirvana days, cumberland university, harvard university.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness. Cale Young Rice: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality.
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