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.
Vachel Lindsay
Edgar A. Guest
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Vachel Lindsay, born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay on November 10, 1879, in Springfield, Illinois, and dead by his own hand on December 5, 1931, in the same Midwestern city, lived a life as dramatic and rhythmically charged as the poems he declaimed on lecture platforms and village greens across America. Often called the “Prairie Troubadour” or the “singing poet,” he sought nothing less than a rebirth of poetry as an oral,…
“The art of poetry is the art of making the commonplace uncommon.”
Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England, on 20 August 1881, and died in Detroit, Michigan, on 5 August 1959, fifteen days before his seventy-eighth birthday. During much of his long life, he was among the most familiar poets in the United States. His name appeared daily in newspapers, his verses were memorized in schools and recited at civic meetings, and his books sold in quantities that many more critica…
“The garden has become a part of the home.”
About 6,480 km separate Springfield, Illinois, USA from Birmingham, England. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Vachel Lindsay: springfield illinois, prairie troubadour, higher vaudeville, general william booth enters into heaven, the congo, harriet monroe, rhythmic poetry, walking journeys. Edgar A. Guest: birmingham, detroit, people's poet, a heap o' livin', just folks, the path to home, it couldn't be done, nellie crossman.
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.
Vachel Lindsay: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder. Edgar A. Guest: Joy, Tenderness, Peace.
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