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 tumultuous landscape of early twentieth-century literature, few figures embodied the era's contradictions and transformations as completely as Richard Aldington. Born Edward Godfree Aldington on July 8, 1892, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, he would emerge as one of the founding voices of literary modernism, only to spend his later years railing against the very movement he helped create. His life trajectory—from pr…
“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”
Orrick Glenday Johns occupies a curious and fascinating position in American literary history. He was neither fully absorbed into the canon of the great modernists nor forgotten entirely by literary historians. Instead, he stands at the threshold between the nineteenth-century poetic tradition and the restless experimentation of the early twentieth century. His life and work reflect a moment of transition in American…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
They overlapped for 55 years (1892–1946).
When Richard Aldington was born, Orrick Johns was about 5.
Richard Aldington was about 54 when Orrick Johns died.
About 6,199 km separate
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from
Sturgis, Michigan, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Richard Aldington:
portsmouth, ezra pound, h.d., imagist movement, evening, the poplar, images of war, bombardment.
Orrick Johns:
sturgis, michigan, asphalt and other poems, university of michigan, romantic tradition, lyric sensitivity, modern urban life, philosophical reflection, nineteenth-century tradition.
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.
