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.
Robert Williams Buchanan
Conrad Aiken
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
On a warm August morning in 1841, in the quiet Staffordshire village of Caverswall, Robert Williams Buchanan was born on August 18. He entered a world already marked by ideological fervor and social upheaval, for his father, Robert Buchanan senior, was no ordinary parent but a passionate advocate of Robert Owen's socialist schemes, traveling the country as an itinerant lecturer preaching cooperation and radical socia…
“Realism, properly so called, is truth, and truth is always beautiful.”
The story of Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) reads like something from a Gothic novel, yet it is the true foundation upon which one of twentieth-century America's most psychologically complex poets built his life and work. Born into comfortable circumstances in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken seemed destined for the privileged life his family background suggested. His father, William Ford Aiken, had s…
“The conception of what it is that constitutes the lyric scope has, if anything, petrified.”
About 6,514 km separate Caverswall, Staffordshire, England from Savannah, Georgia, 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.
Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner. Conrad Aiken: savannah, georgia, william ford aiken, anna potter aiken, ushant, the charnel rose, the jig of forslin, the house of dust, senlin: a biography.
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.
Robert Williams Buchanan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Conrad Aiken: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness.
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