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.
Catherine Pozzi
W. H. Davies
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Catherine Marthe Louise Pozzi remains one of the most enigmatic and haunting figures in French poetry, a writer who distilled an entire spiritual autobiography into just six extraordinary poems while living a life marked by privilege, passion, illness, and relentless intellectual pursuit. Born on July 13, 1882, into the glittering aristocratic and bourgeois milieu of fin-de-siècle Paris, and dying on December 3, 1934…
“Je ne veux pas être heureuse, je veux être entière.”
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“True, a man's first book of poetry may run into a second edition, but people should not write and congratulate him on his success before they know what that means.”
About 482 km separate Paris, Île-de-France, France from Newport, Wales. 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.
Catherine Pozzi: fin-de-siècle paris, samuel jean pozzi, tuberculosis, paul valéry, scopolamine, ave, vale, agnès. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.
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.
Catherine Pozzi: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.