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.
Archibald MacLeish
John Vance Cheney
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 twentieth-century American letters, few figures embodied as many contradictions and reconciliations as Archibald MacLeish. Born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, and dying on April 20, 1982, in Boston, Massachusetts, MacLeish lived through nearly the entire span of the American century, bearing witness to two world wars, the Great Depression, the atomic age, and the cultural revolutions that re…
“A world ends when its metaphor has died.”
In the winter twilight of a small upstate New York village, where snow lay thick upon the Genesee Valley, John Vance Cheney was born on December 29, 1848, in Groveland, New York. His life would span a transformative period in American literature, carrying him from the fading embers of Romanticism to the threshold of Modernism, from the dusty offices of a country law practice to the grand reading rooms of two of Ameri…
About 820 km separate Glencoe, Illinois, USA from Groveland, New York, 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.
Archibald MacLeish: glencoe, illinois, harvard law school, ada hitchcock, the hamlet of a. macleish, conquistador, pulitzer prize, the happy marriage and other poems, the pot of earth. John Vance Cheney: groveland, new york, abigail perkins vance cheney, thistle-drift, the man with the hoe - a reply, century magazine, free public library of san francisco, newberry library, edwin markham.
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.
Archibald MacLeish: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. John Vance Cheney: Peace, Spirituality, Joy.
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