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
Strickland Gillilan
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…
“But a home cannot be builded always on happiness.”
Strickland Gillilan was born on 21 September 1869 in Jackson County, Ohio, a region whose rural rhythms, small-town sociability, and vigorous political culture supplied much of the material from which he would make a career. He died on 25 April 1954 in Baltimore, Maryland, after a long life spent as a journalist, lecturer, humorist, versifier, and public entertainer. In the literary histories that privilege modernism…
“I am a professional public speaker, not one who bugles around to the boys for the reward of a meal.”
About 6,102 km separate Birmingham, England from Jackson County, Ohio, USA. Shared ground: 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. Strickland Gillilan: jackson county, baltimore, the reading mother, including finnigin, sunshine and awkwardness, humorist, newspaper-minded poet, public entertainer.
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. Strickland Gillilan: Joy, Wonder, Irony.
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