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.
Countee Cullen
Lascelles Abercrombie
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 May 30, 1903, a child was born who would become one of the most celebrated voices of the Harlem Renaissance, yet whose origins remain shrouded in the kind of mystery that seems almost poetic in retrospect. Countee Cullen's exact birthplace has been disputed—some records suggest New York City, others Louisville, Kentucky, and still others Baltimore, Maryland. This uncertainty about his origins would prove oddly fit…
“My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.”
In the verdant countryside of Victorian England, on January 9, 1881, a voice was born that would become one of the most distinctive—and contentious—in early twentieth-century British poetry. Lascelles Abercrombie arrived into a world still enchanted by Tennyson's melodies and Browning's dramatic monologues, yet he would live to witness the seismic upheavals of modernism, two world wars, and the transformation of poet…
“No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.”
About 6,293 km separate Louisville, Kentucky, USA from Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire, England. 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.
Countee Cullen: harlem renaissance, new york city, w.e.b. du bois, color, yet do i marvel, incident, copper sun, the ballad of the brown girl. Lascelles Abercrombie: victorian england, ashton-upon-mersey, catherine gwatkin, interludes and poems, georgian poetry, dymock poets, emblems of love, the sale of st. thomas.
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.
Countee Cullen: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Lascelles Abercrombie: Despair, Sorrow, Irony.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.