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.
Ernst Stadler was born on 11 August 1883 in Colmar, in Alsace, and was killed on 30 October 1914 near Zandvoorde in Flanders during the First World War. His life lasted little more than thirty-one years, and the body of poetry on which his reputation rests is correspondingly small. Yet his importance in German-language literature is out of proportion to its size. Stadler stands among the decisive early voices of Expr…
“Or do I merely see things differently because I lack this kind of bravado, and can imagine and wish for another task in life than to let a shell tear me to pieces.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, German Romantics
In the winter twilight of a small upstate New York village, where snow lay thick upon the Genesee Valley, John Vance Cheney was born on December 29, 1848, in Groveland, New York. His life would span a transformative period in American literature, carrying him from the fading embers of Romanticism to the threshold of Modernism, from the dusty offices of a country law practice to the grand reading rooms of two of Ameri…
They overlapped for 32 years (1883–1914).
When Ernst Stadler was born, John Vance Cheney was about 35.
John Vance Cheney was about 66 when Ernst Stadler died.
About 6,327 km separate
Colmar, Alsace, France from
Groveland, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Ernst Stadler:
colmar, alsace, first world war, der aufbruch, expressionism, oxford, walt whitman, strasbourg.
John Vance Cheney:
groveland, new york, abigail perkins vance cheney, thistle-drift, the man with the hoe - a reply, century magazine, free public library of san francisco, newberry library, edwin markham.
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.
