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.
Robinson Jeffers
J. C. Squire
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 pantheon of American poetry, few figures stand as simultaneously revered and controversial as Robinson Jeffers, the brooding visionary who built his stone tower on the wild coast of California and crafted verses as uncompromising as the granite cliffs that inspired them. Born John Robinson Jeffers on January 10, 1887, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become one of the twentieth century's most distinctive…
“Our ends tend to be rather sad, and we bawl at birth.”
In the smoky literary salons of early twentieth-century London, few figures loomed larger than John Collings Squire, a man whose influence extended far beyond his own considerable poetic output to shape an entire generation of English letters. Born on April 2, 1884, in Plymouth, Devon, Squire would become one of the most powerful literary editors of his age, a respected poet in his own right, and a lightning rod for…
About 5,762 km separate Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA from Plymouth, Devon, 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.
Robinson Jeffers: inhumanism, tor house, hawk tower, una call kuster, big sur, california coast, the bowl of blood, tamar and other poems. J. C. Squire: plymouth, blundell's school, st. john's college, the new statesman, solomon eagle, the three hills and other poems, poems and baudelaire flowers, to a bull-dog.
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.
Robinson Jeffers: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder. J. C. Squire: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder.
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