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.
Hart Crane
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Hart Crane’s life was a blaze of incandescent vision cut short by the very torments that fueled his art. Born Harold Hart Crane on July 21, 1899, in the quiet village of Garrettsville, Ohio, he arrived into a world already humming with the industrial promise that would later become the spine of his poetry. His father, Clarence A. Crane, was a shrewd and ambitious candy manufacturer who would one day invent the Life S…
“The new conditions of life demand a new form of poetry.”
Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson was born on 8 December 1832 in Kvikne, a mountain district in what is now Innlandet, Norway, and died on 26 April 1910 in Paris. During his long life he became, by turns and often simultaneously, a novelist, poet, dramatist, editor, theatre director, lecturer, political agitator, public moralist, farmer, husband, father, and international advocate for national self-determination. Few w…
“Nature is a temple where the spirit finds its true rest and renewal.”
About 6,097 km separate Garrettsville, Ohio, United States from Kvikne, Norway. 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.
Hart Crane: garrettsville, cleveland, white buildings, the bridge, emil opffer, waldo frank, guggenheim fellowship, brooklyn bridge. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: kvikne, ja, vi elsker dette landet, synnøve solbakken, four greats, karoline reimers, norwegian theatre, mellem slagene, sigurd slembe.
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.
Hart Crane: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.