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.
Joaquin Miller
Juliusz Słowacki
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Joaquin Miller, born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on September 8, 1837, and dead on February 17, 1913, lived a life that seemed designed to invite legend. He was a poet, journalist, lawyer, teacher, dramatist, lecturer, rancher, and relentless self-inventor. To admirers in the nineteenth century, he was the “Poet of the Sierras,” a bard who had given the American West its own grand, romantic voice. To skeptics, he was an…
“Books? To hell with books! Books are for people who cannot think.”
Juliusz Słowacki was born on 4 September 1809 in Krzemieniec, in Volhynia, a town then located within the Russian Empire and now known as Kremenets in Ukraine. He died in Paris on 3 April 1849, not yet forty years old, but by then he had produced a body of poetry and drama of extraordinary range, daring, and linguistic power. Together with Adam Mickiewicz and Zygmunt Krasiński, he stands among the central figures of…
“I want to transform reason into wisdom, awaken a person, and give him an impulse towards the great purposes of life.”
About 7,874 km separate Indiana, USA from Krzemieniec, Ukraine. 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.
Joaquin Miller: poet of the sierras, oregon territory, life amongst the modocs, kit carson's ride, songs of the sierras, songs of the sun-lands, theresa dyer, abigail leland. Juliusz Słowacki: krzemieniec, polish romanticism, adam mickiewicz, zygmunt krasiński, november uprising, kordian, poezje, mindowe.
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.
Joaquin Miller: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Juliusz Słowacki: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality.
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