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.
Yone Noguchi
Edmund William Gosse
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 annals of literary history, few figures occupy as singular a position as Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who dared to write primarily in English during an era when such a choice seemed almost inconceivable. Born Yonejiro Noguchi on December 8, 1875, in the coastal town of Tsushima near Nagoya, Japan, he would become a pioneering voice in cross-cultural literature, a man who walked between East and West with rema…
“Truth is truth, not less, not more, under any circumstances.”
Edmund William Gosse occupies a peculiar and fascinating position in the landscape of English literature. Neither wholly a major poet nor a minor footnote, he exists instead as a crucial connector, a literary ambassador who bridged the austere certainties of Victorian England with the modernist experiments of the twentieth century. Born on September 21, 1849, in London, and dying on May 16, 1928, in the same city, Go…
“Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful whom you blame.”
About 9,501 km separate Tsushima, Aichi, Japan from London, 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.
Yone Noguchi: tsushima, nagoya, keio university, joaquin miller, seen and unseen, the american diary of a japanese girl, from the eastern sea, the pilgrimage. Edmund William Gosse: london, philip henry gosse, emily bowes, on viol and flute, king erik, pre-raphaelites, henrik ibsen, father and son.
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.
Yone Noguchi: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Edmund William Gosse: Tenderness, Peace, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.