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
Richard Rowlands
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“We are tired of being nothing but an afterglow, a latecomer.”
Richard Rowlands, better known to history as Richard Verstegan or Verstegen, was born in London about 1550 and died in Antwerp in 1640. He belongs to that unusually rich category of Renaissance figures whose lives resist simple professional labels. He was a poet, translator, engraver, publisher, controversialist, antiquary, journalist, intelligence agent, and committed Catholic exile. He wrote in English, Latin, Dutc…
“She had that instinctive malice that makes one pick out for hatred the very persons who have done one a good turn. She was not merely ungrateful, but her only response to a benefit received was to revenge it.”
About 647 km separate Colmar, Alsace, France from East London, England. Shared ground: Belgium.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Ernst Stadler: colmar, alsace, first world war, der aufbruch, expressionism, oxford, walt whitman, strasbourg. Richard Rowlands: london, antwerp, edmund campion, theatrum crudelitatum, catholic exile, christ church oxford, goldsmiths' company, william allen.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Ernst Stadler: Longing, Fear, Sensuality. Richard Rowlands: Tenderness, Joy, Peace.
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