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 pantheon of Victorian literature, few figures present such a delightful paradox as William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911). Here was a man who could craft lyrics of sublime wit and devastating social commentary, yet whose temperament was notoriously prickly and contentious. A writer who created some of the most beloved comic operas in the English language while maintaining a reputation as one of London's most dif…
“I am not a dramatic author; I am a maker of plays. I construct them as a carpenter constructs a table.”
William H. A. Moore, born about 1885 and deceased in 1960, belongs to that important but still insufficiently recovered generation of African American poets whose careers connected the literary culture of the late nineteenth century with the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance and its related movements in Chicago, Washington, and other urban centers. His surviving reputation rests on a small body of lyric poetry, sca…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
They overlapped for 27 years (1885–1911).
When William H. A. Moore was born, William Schwenck Gilbert was about 49.
William H. A. Moore was about 26 when William Schwenck Gilbert died.
About 5,571 km separate
17 Southampton Street, The Strand, London from
New York City, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
William Schwenck Gilbert:
southampton, lucy agnes turner, trial by jury, the sorcerer, h.m.s. pinafore, the mikado, the bab ballads, richard d'oyly carte.
William H. A. Moore:
new york city, dusk songs, the crisis, james weldon johnson, harlem renaissance, city college of new york, columbia university, 1919 race riot.
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.
