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.
Cecil Frances Alexander
Madison Julius Cawein
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Cecil Frances Alexander, born Cecil Frances Humphreys on 14 April 1818 and dead on 12 October 1895, became one of the most widely sung and influential hymn writers of the nineteenth century. Her name may be less immediately familiar than the opening lines of her best-known hymns, yet “Once in Royal David’s City,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and “Jesus Calls Us o’er the Tumult”…
“Thank God! I do like to hear that.”
Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 March 1865, at the unsettled close of the Civil War, and died there on 8 December 1914, not yet fifty years old. During his lifetime he was among the best-known American poets of his generation, a writer praised by influential editors, admired in Britain as well as the United States, and affectionately called the “Keats of Kentucky.” After his death, howev…
About 6,049 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Louisville, Kentucky, USA. 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.
Cecil Frances Alexander: anglo-irish protestant, william alexander, once in royal david's city, all things bright and beautiful, there is a green hill far away, jesus calls us o’er the tumult, hymns for little children, verses for holy seasons. Madison Julius Cawein: louisville, keats of kentucky, blooms of the berry, kentucky poems, edmund clarence stedman, gertrude foster mckelvey, myth and romance, intimations of the beautiful.
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.
Cecil Frances Alexander: Spirituality, Wonder, Joy. Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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