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.
Robinson Jeffers
Witter Bynner
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 pantheon of American poetry, few figures stand as simultaneously revered and controversial as Robinson Jeffers, the brooding visionary who built his stone tower on the wild coast of California and crafted verses as uncompromising as the granite cliffs that inspired them. Born John Robinson Jeffers on January 10, 1887, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become one of the twentieth century's most distinctive…
“I decided not to tell lies in verse.”
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“Even in phraseology they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another, but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.”
About 512 km separate Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robinson Jeffers: inhumanism, tor house, hawk tower, una call kuster, big sur, california coast, the bowl of blood, tamar and other poems. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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.
Robinson Jeffers: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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