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
John Crowe Ransom
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…
“Literature is news that stays news.”
John Crowe Ransom stood at the crossroads of American poetry and criticism in the twentieth century, a figure whose influence extended far beyond the elegant verses he composed. Born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee, he would become the architect of a critical revolution, the mentor to some of America's finest poets, and the principal voice of a distinctly Southern literary aesthetic that sought to reconcile…
“The poem is a thing made out of the language, and it is not a representation of something else.”
About 2,507 km separate Hailey, Idaho, USA from Pulaski, Tennessee, 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. John Crowe Ransom: pulaski, tennessee, john james ransom, ella crowe ransom, vanderbilt university, fugitive group, the fugitive, allen tate, robert penn warren.
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. John Crowe Ransom: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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