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.
Edgar A. Guest
Bret Harte
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England, on 20 August 1881, and died in Detroit, Michigan, on 5 August 1959, fifteen days before his seventy-eighth birthday. During much of his long life, he was among the most familiar poets in the United States. His name appeared daily in newspapers, his verses were memorized in schools and recited at civic meetings, and his books sold in quantities that many more critica…
“The garden has become a part of the home.”
Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…
“There was a thoughtfulness over everything, as if the whole landscape had been surprised into reflection over some subtle premonition of the coming winter.”
About 5,273 km separate Birmingham, England from Albany, New York, USA. Shared ground: United Kingdom, United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Edgar A. Guest: birmingham, detroit, people's poet, a heap o' livin', just folks, the path to home, it couldn't be done, nellie crossman. Bret Harte: albany, new york, camberley, surrey, gold rush, overland monthly, the luck of roaring camp, the outcasts of poker flat, anna griswold, samuel clemens.
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.
Edgar A. Guest: Joy, Tenderness, Peace. Bret Harte: Sorrow, Longing, Irony.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.