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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
T. S. Eliot
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and dead 22 March 1832 in Weimar, became during his own lifetime a European institution: poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, civil servant, theater director, scientific investigator, memoirist, and theorist of culture. To call him Germany’s greatest writer is conventional but not empty praise. Goethe helped give the German language a literary authori…
“It takes considerable courage not to become disheartened in the world.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”
About 7,374 km separate Frankfurt, Germany from St. Louis, Missouri, 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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: frankfurt am main, weimar, sturm und drang, the sorrows of young werther, götz von berlichingen, anna katharina schönkopf, friederike brion, charlotte von stein. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.