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
Edmund William Gosse
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.”
Edmund William Gosse occupies a peculiar and fascinating position in the landscape of English literature. Neither wholly a major poet nor a minor footnote, he exists instead as a crucial connector, a literary ambassador who bridged the austere certainties of Victorian England with the modernist experiments of the twentieth century. Born on September 21, 1849, in London, and dying on May 16, 1928, in the same city, Go…
“War is the great scavenger of thought.”
About 747 km separate Geneva, Switzerland from London, 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.
Trumbull Stickney: geneva, boston, harvard college, william vaughn moody, george santayana, dramatic lyrics, greek tragedy, american school of classical studies. Edmund William Gosse: london, philip henry gosse, emily bowes, on viol and flute, king erik, pre-raphaelites, henrik ibsen, father and son.
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.
Trumbull Stickney: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Edmund William Gosse: Tenderness, Peace, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.