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.
Lewis Carroll
Raymond Garfield Dandridge
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who became immortal under the name Lewis Carroll, was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, England, and died on 14 January 1898 at Guildford, Surrey. He was a Victorian clergyman, Oxford mathematician, logician, lecturer, photographer, inventor, letter writer, satirist, and author of some of the most celebrated imaginative literature in the English language. Yet the word “author”…
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Raymond Garfield Dandridge emerged from the working-class streets of Cincinnati’s Price Hill neighborhood as one of the most resilient and distinctive voices in early twentieth-century African American poetry. Born around 1882 in a modest home that overlooked the rolling hills and river valleys of southern Ohio, he lived a life defined by both vibrant physical promise and profound physical limitation. By the time he…
“Tis good to make the best of it.”
About 6,131 km separate Daresbury, Cheshire, England from Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. 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.
Lewis Carroll: daresbury, cheshire, guildford, victorian clergyman, oxford mathematician, alice's adventures in wonderland, through the looking-glass, jabberwocky. Raymond Garfield Dandridge: price hill, penciled poems, the poet and other poems, zalka peetruza, paul laurence dunbar, harlem renaissance, hemiplegia, ellen c. dandridge.
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.
Lewis Carroll: Irony, Joy, Wonder. Raymond Garfield Dandridge: Sorrow, Despair, Spirituality.
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