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.
Louis Untermeyer
Carl Sandburg
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 sprawling landscape of twentieth-century American letters, few figures cast as long or as peculiar a shadow as Louis Untermeyer. Born on October 1, 1885, in New York City, and dying ninety-two years later on December 18, 1977, in Newtown, Connecticut, Untermeyer occupied a unique position in American cultural life. He was not primarily remembered as a great poet himself, though he published volumes of verse. H…
“The imagination is the instrument of poetry.”
Carl Sandburg, born 6 January 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, and dead 22 July 1967 in Flat Rock, North Carolina, became one of the most recognizable American writers of the twentieth century: a poet of factories and prairies, a journalist of civic life, a collector and performer of folk songs, a novelist and children’s writer, and the immensely popular biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Few writers worked so deliberately t…
“Life is like an onion; you peel off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.”
About 1,375 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Galesburg, Illinois, 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.
Louis Untermeyer: new york city, newtown, connecticut, modern american poetry, harriet monroe, ezra pound, t.s. eliot, carl sandburg, robert frost. Carl Sandburg: galesburg, flat rock, abraham lincoln, chicago, lillian steichen, chicago poems, cornhuskers, smoke and steel.
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.
Louis Untermeyer: Despair, Sorrow, Longing. Carl Sandburg: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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