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.
Ronald Ross
Conrad Aiken
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
On a sweltering August evening in 1897, in a ramshackle laboratory in Secunderabad, India, a British army surgeon made a discovery that would save millions of lives. After dissecting his twentieth mosquito of the day, Ronald Ross finally observed what he had been seeking for years: the malarial parasite nestled within the insect's gut. That night, exhausted but exultant, he composed a poem celebrating his breakthroug…
“The mosquito is the most dangerous animal in the world.”
The story of Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) reads like something from a Gothic novel, yet it is the true foundation upon which one of twentieth-century America's most psychologically complex poets built his life and work. Born into comfortable circumstances in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken seemed destined for the privileged life his family background suggested. His father, William Ford Aiken, had s…
“This image became something I had to be.”
About 12,845 km separate Almora, Uttarakhand, India from Savannah, Georgia, USA. 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.
Ronald Ross: secunderabad, nobel prize, malaria transmission, in exile, ronald campbell, rosa bessie bloxam, the child of ocean, patrick manson. Conrad Aiken: savannah, georgia, william ford aiken, anna potter aiken, ushant, the charnel rose, the jig of forslin, the house of dust, senlin: a biography.
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.
Ronald Ross: Wonder, Irony, Spirituality. Conrad Aiken: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness.
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