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.
In the rolling hills of Carmarthenshire, where the coal dust mingles with morning mist and the Welsh language flows like the streams that carve the valleys, a remarkable story unfolded in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is the story of Watkin Hezekiah Williams, better known by his bardic name Watcyn Wyn, whose journey from the depths of coal mines to the heights of Welsh literary achievement embodies th…
“It is not right because He gave it to us; He gave it to us because it is right.”
In the early decades of the twentieth century, when American poetry was undergoing one of its most dramatic transformations, a young man of Irish heritage was crafting verses that sought to bridge the ancient traditions of Celtic literature with the modern sensibilities of his adopted homeland. Shaemas O'Sheel, born James Shields in New York City on January 12, 1886, would become one of the more intriguing yet ultima…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets
About 5,292 km separate
Ddolgam, Carmarthenshire, Wales from
New York City, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Watcyn Wyn:
carmarthenshire, ddolgam, cwmgarw ganol, brynaman, mary jones, evan williams, j. j. copeland, gibea chapel.
Shaemas O'Sheel:
new york city, irish heritage, they went forth to battle, but they always fell, jealous of dead leaves, irish literary revival, w.b. yeats, harriet monroe, socialism.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
