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.
Matsuo Bashō
Andrew Marvell
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Matsuo Bashō, born in 1644 and dead on 28 November 1694, occupies a singular place in Japanese literature: he was at once a professional poet, teacher, traveler, theorist, editor, correspondent, and restless seeker after a way of seeing. His name is now inseparable from haiku, although the compact poems for which he is famous were called hokku in his own lifetime and originally functioned as opening verses for collab…
“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Andrew Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in the small village of Winestead in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell. The family soon moved to the bustling port town of Hull when the elder Marvell was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse, a charitable institution. Young Andrew grew up amid the sounds of the sea and the…
“I am (if I may say it with reverence) drawn in, I hope by a good Providence, to intermeddle in a noble and high argument.”
About 9,308 km separate Ueno, Mie Prefecture, Japan from Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England. 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.
Matsuo Bashō: ueno, iga province, tokugawa shogunate, tōdō yoshitada, kai ōi, minashiguri, haikai, haibun. Andrew Marvell: winestead, hull, trinity college, mary fairfax, upon appleton house, the garden, to his coy mistress, the mower's song.
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.
Matsuo Bashō: Peace, Wonder, Spirituality. Andrew Marvell: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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