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.
Ezra Pound
Louis Untermeyer
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on 30 October 1885 in Hailey, in the Idaho Territory of the United States, and died on 1 November 1972 in Venice, Italy. Few writers altered the course of twentieth-century poetry as decisively as he did, and few have left behind a legacy so divided between artistic admiration and moral revulsion. Pound was a poet, editor, translator, critic, impresario, polemicist, and tireless orga…
“Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.”
In the sprawling landscape of twentieth-century American letters, few figures cast as long or as peculiar a shadow as Louis Untermeyer. Born on October 1, 1885, in New York City, and dying ninety-two years later on December 18, 1977, in Newtown, Connecticut, Untermeyer occupied a unique position in American cultural life. He was not primarily remembered as a great poet himself, though he published volumes of verse. H…
“It is the non-conformers, the innovators in art, science, technology, and human relations who, misunderstood and ridiculed in their own times, have shaped our world.”
About 3,307 km separate Hailey, Idaho, USA from New York City, 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.
Ezra Pound: hailey, venice, imagism, vorticism, t.s. eliot, james joyce, h.d., the cantos. Louis Untermeyer: new york city, newtown, connecticut, modern american poetry, harriet monroe, ezra pound, t.s. eliot, carl sandburg, robert frost.
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.
Ezra Pound: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Louis Untermeyer: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.
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