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 annals of Scottish literature, few stories are as compelling as that of Alexander Anderson, the railway worker who earned fame under the moniker "Surfaceman" and whose poetry bridged the gap between the gritty reality of industrial Scotland and the refined world of Victorian letters. Born into humble circumstances and rising through sheer determination and literary talent, Anderson's life embodies the democrat…
“I put my whole heart into my verses, for they are the direct outcome of what I have felt and seen.”
In the golden age of American newspaper poetry, when verses appeared on editorial pages alongside the day's news and readers clipped favorite stanzas to paste in scrapbooks, few voices resonated more warmly with the reading public than that of Nixon Waterman. Born on November 12, 1859, in the small prairie town of Newark, Illinois, Waterman would rise from humble agricultural beginnings to become one of the most wide…
They overlapped for 51 years (1859–1909).
When Nixon Waterman was born, Alexander Anderson was about 14.
Nixon Waterman was about 50 when Alexander Anderson died.
About 6,020 km separate
Kirkconnel, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland from
Newark, Illinois, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Alexander Anderson:
kirkconnel, crocketford, dumfries and galloway, surfaceman, songs of the rail, two angels, cuddle doon, ballads and sonnets.
Nixon Waterman:
newark, illinois, creston, iowa, chicago herald, small change, a rose to the living, opinion columns, ben king's verse, some home-made poems.
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.
