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
Samuel Hoffenstein
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 poet is not a man who says things, but one who makes things happen.”
Samuel Hoffenstein entered the world on October 8, 1890, in the Lithuanian corner of the Russian Empire—a place of rolling fields, resilient Jewish communities, and the quiet tensions of life under imperial rule. Some records nod toward Odessa in what is now Ukraine as his birthplace, but the heart of his story begins with the immigrant voyage his family undertook when he was just four years old in 1894. Josiah Mayer…
About 7,796 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Odessa, Ukraine. 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. Samuel Hoffenstein: lithuanian, wilkes-barre, edith morgan, life sings a song, poems in praise of practically nothing, new york city, horace liveright, the dome.
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. Samuel Hoffenstein: Longing, Irony, Sorrow.
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