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.
Trumbull Stickney
Matsuo Bashō
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Joseph Trumbull Stickney, known almost always as Trumbull Stickney, was born on 20 June 1874 in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Boston on 11 October 1904. His brief life, ending when he was only thirty, has encouraged the familiar image of the doomed young poet whose promise exceeds his surviving achievement. That image is not wholly wrong, but it is too simple. Stickney was not merely a promising lyricist interrupt…
“There's nothing to get out of life; there are ways to live it.”
Matsuo Bashō, born in 1644 and dead on 28 November 1694, occupies a singular place in Japanese literature: he was at once a professional poet, teacher, traveler, theorist, editor, correspondent, and restless seeker after a way of seeing. His name is now inseparable from haiku, although the compact poems for which he is famous were called hokku in his own lifetime and originally functioned as opening verses for collab…
“Follow the path of the ancients, seek what they sought, and then go beyond them.”
About 9,712 km separate Geneva, Switzerland from Ueno, Mie Prefecture, 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.
Trumbull Stickney: geneva, boston, harvard college, william vaughn moody, george santayana, dramatic lyrics, greek tragedy, american school of classical studies. Matsuo Bashō: ueno, iga province, tokugawa shogunate, tōdō yoshitada, kai ōi, minashiguri, haikai, haibun.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Trumbull Stickney: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Matsuo Bashō: Peace, Wonder, Spirituality.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.