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.
Ernest Hemingway
William Butler Yeats
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb west of Chicago, and died on 2 July 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. He became one of the most recognizable writers of the twentieth century: novelist, short-story master, journalist, war correspondent, celebrity, sportsman, and, in his earliest publications, a poet. His name came to signify a style as much as a body of work. Hemingway…
“I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross.”
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount, County Dublin, and died on 28 January 1939 at Menton, France. During the seventy-three years between those dates, he became not merely Ireland’s most internationally celebrated modern poet but one of the major writers in English. Poet, dramatist, essayist, editor, cultural organizer, senator, and tireless architect of literary institutions, Yeats made a car…
“But it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses.”
About 5,899 km separate Oak Park, Illinois, USA from Dublin, Ireland. 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.
Ernest Hemingway: oak park, ketchum, agnes von kurowsky, hadley richardson, pauline pfeiffer, lost generation, the sun also rises, a farewell to arms. William Butler Yeats: sandymount, county dublin, menton, maud gonne, the wanderings of oisin, the second coming, sailing to byzantium, abbey theatre.
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.
Ernest Hemingway: Irony, Sorrow, Despair. William Butler Yeats: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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