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.
In the autumn of 1871, as France was still reeling from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune, a child was born in the Mediterranean port town of Sète who would become one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary intellects. Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry entered the world on October 30th, in a region where the brilliant southern light seemed to sharpe…
“The spirit, a man of spirit once told me, is merely stupidity in motion; and genius is stupidity in a frenzy.”
Neighbourhood:
French Symbolists, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Howard Phelps Putnam was born in 1894 in Allston, Massachusetts, then a distinctly suburban and semi-rural part of Boston, and died on July 3, 1948, in Jamaica Plain. He belonged to the generation of American writers formed between the confident cultural inheritance of the nineteenth century and the disillusioning modernity of the First World War. His reputation never became as large as those of several Yale contempo…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
They overlapped for 52 years (1894–1945).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Paul Valéry was about 23.
Howard Phelps Putnam was about 51 when Paul Valéry died.
About 5,875 km separate
Sète, Occitanie, France from
Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Paul Valéry:
sète, franco-prussian war, paris commune, symbolist movement, stéphane mallarmé, la jeune parque, le cimetière marin, charmes.
Howard Phelps Putnam:
allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét.
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.
