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
William Strode
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.”
William Strode, baptized on 11 January 1602/3 and dead by 1645, belonged to that abundant but still partly shadowed generation of English writers who made the early seventeenth century one of the most inventive periods in the history of English poetry. He was a clergyman, Oxford academic, university orator, court entertainer, dramatist, and lyric poet. In each role he displayed verbal ease, learning, and an appetite…
About 9,765 km separate Ueno, Mie Prefecture, Japan from Plymouth, Devon, 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. William Strode: devonshire gentry, william laud, christ church oxford, the floating island, richard corbet, public orator, caroline manuscript verse, royalist.
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. William Strode: Tenderness, Wonder, Sorrow.
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