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
Wilfred Owen
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.”
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…
“Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill.”
About 6,389 km separate Springfield, Illinois, USA from Oswestry, Shropshire, 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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Vachel Lindsay: springfield illinois, prairie troubadour, higher vaudeville, general william booth enters into heaven, the congo, harriet monroe, rhythmic poetry, walking journeys. Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled.
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. Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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