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.
George Santayana
Sadakichi Hartmann
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
George Santayana, born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás on 16 December 1863 in Madrid and dead in Rome on 26 September 1952, was one of the most elegant and elusive figures in American intellectual life. He was a philosopher, literary critic, poet, novelist, memoirist, teacher, and aphorist; yet no single profession completely contains him. Although he spent his formative adult years at Harvard and wr…
“The family is one of nature's masterpieces.”
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“There was nothing overwhelming to me in Whitman's face, but I liked it at once for its healthy manliness.”
About 10,586 km separate Madrid, Spain from Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan. 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.
George Santayana: madrid, rome, harvard, william james, lucifer: a theological tragedy, a hermit of carmel, sonnets and other verses, catholic atheist. Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed.
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.
George Santayana: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing.
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