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.
Thomas Hardy
Arthur Davison Ficke
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Thomas Hardy stands as one of the most significant literary figures of the Victorian and early modern periods, a writer whose novels explored the tragic dimensions of human experience with unflinching honesty and whose poetry achieved a stark beauty that influenced generations of twentieth-century poets. Born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England, and dying on January 11, 1928, in Max Gate, Dorchest…
“The poet is not concerned with the general, but with the particular.”
Arthur Davison Ficke was born in Davenport, Iowa, on 10 November 1883, at a moment when the United States was rapidly becoming both an industrial power and a more self-conscious literary nation. He died on 30 November 1945, at the age of sixty-two, leaving a body of poetry that can seem difficult to classify neatly. He was at once a disciplined maker of sonnets, a cosmopolitan traveler, a student of Asian cultures, a…
“The quietest moments often contain the loudest truths.”
About 6,462 km separate Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England from Davenport, Iowa, USA. 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.
Thomas Hardy: higher bockhampton, dorset, egdon heath, emma lavinia gifford, far from the madding crowd, the return of the native, the mayor of casterbridge, tess of the d'urbervilles. Arthur Davison Ficke: davenport, iowa, spectra hoax, witter bynner, anne knish, harvard university, the breaking of bonds, sonnets of a portrait-painter.
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.
Thomas Hardy: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Arthur Davison Ficke: Fear, Sorrow, Wonder.
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