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.
Adelaide Crapsey
Ben King
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“I'll be back at work next year—see if I'm not.”
Benjamin Franklin King Jr., known almost everywhere in print as Ben King, was born on 17 March 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and died on 8 April 1894 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His life lasted only thirty-seven years, and his reputation has never approached that of the best-known American poets of his generation. Yet King was far from insignificant in his own day. He belonged to the large, lively, and now too often…
“If I should die to-night, and you should come to my cold corpse and say, weeping and longing, I would not care.”
About 963 km separate Saranac Lake, New York, USA from St. Joseph, Michigan, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Adelaide Crapsey: saranac lake, cinquain, imagist poetry, algernon sidney crapsey, vassar college, smith college, november night, the warning. Ben King: st. joseph, michigan, bowling green, kentucky, if i should die to-night, late nineteenth-century, newspaper verse, comic prose, mark twain, james whitcomb riley.
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.
Adelaide Crapsey: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder. Ben King: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.
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