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.
John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Genevieve Taggard
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Gillespie Magee Jr., born in Shanghai, China, on 9 June 1922 and killed over Lincolnshire, England, on 11 December 1941, occupies an unusual and enduring place in twentieth-century literature. He is remembered above all for “High Flight,” the fourteen-line poem that begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” and ends with one of the most quoted conclusions in English poetry: “Put out my hand, and tou…
“I have no idea whether it is any good or not.”
Genevieve Taggard was born on November 28, 1894, in the small farming community of Waitsburg, Washington, a place of dust-choked fields and modest wooden houses that would later stand in stark contrast to the lush paradise of her childhood memories. She died on November 8, 1948, in a New York City hospital, just shy of her fifty-fourth birthday, her body worn down by chronic hypertension that had increasingly confine…
“Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me? No indeed. I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial.”
About 9,524 km separate Shanghai, China from Waitsburg, Washington, 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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
John Gillespie Magee Jr.: shanghai, high flight, royal canadian air force, rugby school, rupert brooke, canadian air force, supermarine spitfire, sonnet to rupert brooke. Genevieve Taggard: waitsburg, washington, honolulu, hawaii, robert l. wolf, marcia liles, for eager lovers, hawaiian hilltop, travelling standing still, the life and mind of emily dickinson.
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.
John Gillespie Magee Jr.: Joy, Wonder, Spirituality. Genevieve Taggard: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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