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.
Arthur Rimbaud
John Crowe Ransom
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, and died on 10 November 1891 in Marseille. Few writers have produced so small a body of work and so immense a legend. Rimbaud wrote nearly all the poetry for which he is remembered between his mid-teens and about twenty, then turned away from literature with an apparent decisiveness that has fascinat…
“I have decided not to stay in Aden.”
John Crowe Ransom stood at the crossroads of American poetry and criticism in the twentieth century, a figure whose influence extended far beyond the elegant verses he composed. Born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee, he would become the architect of a critical revolution, the mentor to some of America's finest poets, and the principal voice of a distinctly Southern literary aesthetic that sought to reconcile…
“The more eminent the professor of English, the less apt he is to be able to write decent criticism.”
About 7,217 km separate Charleville, Ardennes, France from Pulaski, Tennessee, 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.
Arthur Rimbaud: charleville, marseille, franco-prussian war, paul verlaine, madame rimbaud, les étrennes des orphelins, le dormeur du val, le bateau ivre. John Crowe Ransom: pulaski, tennessee, john james ransom, ella crowe ransom, vanderbilt university, fugitive group, the fugitive, allen tate, robert penn warren.
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.
Arthur Rimbaud: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. John Crowe Ransom: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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