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.
Arthur Macy
Robert Williams Buchanan
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Arthur Macy (June 6, 1842 – June 1, 1904) emerged as a distinctive voice in 19th-century American poetry, blending Quaker sensibility with a soldier’s grit and a businessman’s pragmatism. Born on Nantucket Island to Oliver C. Macy and Phebe Fowler Macy, descendants of Thomas Macy—the Quaker leader who famously purchased Nantucket from Indigenous tribes—Arthur’s early life was steeped in New England’s maritime culture…
“I'm coming round soon for a good long gam.”
On a warm August morning in 1841, in the quiet Staffordshire village of Caverswall, Robert Williams Buchanan was born on August 18. He entered a world already marked by ideological fervor and social upheaval, for his father, Robert Buchanan senior, was no ordinary parent but a passionate advocate of Robert Owen's socialist schemes, traveling the country as an itinerant lecturer preaching cooperation and radical socia…
“Originality, in the eyes of the modern Minerva, is a rather offensive form of vagabondism; but to be mediocre is to be highly respectable.”
About 5,094 km separate Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, USA from Caverswall, Staffordshire, England. 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.
Arthur Macy: nantucket island, detroit, civil war, 24th michigan infantry, gettysburg, mary t. winchell, poems, the rollicking mastodon. Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner.
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.
Arthur Macy: Joy, Peace, Irony. Robert Williams Buchanan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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