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
George Sterling
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.”
George Sterling was born on 1 December 1869 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, and died on 17 November 1926 in San Francisco, California. During his lifetime he was celebrated, often extravagantly, as the foremost poet of the American Pacific Coast: a writer of redwood groves, desert immensities, sea fog, cosmic fire, erotic dream, and supernatural terror. His reputation later suffered a dramatic eclipse. The rich…
About 1,172 km separate Indiana, USA from Sag Harbor, New York, USA. Both have ground in California.
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. George Sterling: sag harbor, san francisco, the testimony of the suns, a wine of wizardry, ambrose bierce, jack london, bohemian club, california poet.
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. George Sterling: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness.
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