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.
Rudyard Kipling
R. Williams Parry
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Rudyard Kipling was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on December 30, 1865, in the bustling colonial port of Bombay, British India, a city that would forever pulse through his veins like the monsoon rains and the clamor of its streets. He died on January 18, 1936, in London, England, at the age of seventy, his body laid to rest in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey after a life that spanned the height of the British Empire…
“We hope that some will so survive.”
Robert Williams Parry, known in literature as R. Williams Parry, was born on 6 March 1884 at Talysarn in the Nantlle Valley of Caernarfonshire, north-west Wales, and died on 4 January 1956. He became one of the most admired Welsh-language poets of the twentieth century, though he was never a prolific author in the ordinary commercial sense. His reputation rests instead upon a relatively small body of exceptionally fi…
About 7,490 km separate Mumbai, Maharashtra, India from Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier. R. Williams Parry: talysarn, nantlle valley, yr haf a cherddi eraill, the summer and other poems, y llwynog, the fox, cynghanedd, welsh-language poetry.
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.
Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing. R. Williams Parry: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.