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.
Witter Bynner
Leonard Bacon
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“Through the Asian centuries everyone has written verse.”
Leonard Bacon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, translator, and critic, was a figure whose life and work embodied the enduring power of traditional verse to illuminate the absurdities, adventures, and quiet profundities of the human condition. Born at the close of the nineteenth century and passing in the middle of the tumultuous twentieth, he navigated an era of literary upheaval with a steadfast commitment…
“I knew I wanted to write poetry and nothing but poetry.”
About 320 km separate Brooklyn, New York, USA from Syracuse, New York, USA. Both have ground in New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu. Leonard Bacon: solvay, new york, peace dale, rhode island, sunderland capture, pulitzer prize, the scrannel pipe, autolycus, montana cattle trails, eureka ranch.
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.
Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Leonard Bacon: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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