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.
Watcyn Wyn
W. H. Davies
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“Pure rejoicing is pure health. Let us never destroy it.”
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“Such books are never any good to me, for, if I enjoy them, I am robbed of that joy by the thought that they are not mine.”
About 89 km separate Ddolgam, Carmarthenshire, Wales from Newport, Wales. Both have ground in Cymru / Wales.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Watcyn Wyn: carmarthenshire, ddolgam, cwmgarw ganol, brynaman, mary jones, evan williams, j. j. copeland, gibea chapel. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.
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.
Watcyn Wyn: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.
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