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.
Ralph Hodgson was born on 9 September 1871 in Darlington, County Durham, and died on 3 November 1962 in Minerva, Ohio. His life traversed an astonishing stretch of history: the late Victorian industrial world, the upheaval of two world wars, the flowering and fragmentation of literary modernism, and the gradual emergence of a more public consciousness about animals and the natural environment. Yet his poetry seems to…
“I see such carnage in the future.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
William Wilfred Campbell, often known simply as Wilfred Campbell, stands as one of the most distinctive voices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian literature. A member of the Confederation Poets—the group that gave Canada its first truly national literary flowering after 1867—he captured the raw, majestic spirit of the Canadian landscape with a passion that still stirs the imagination today. His…
They overlapped for 48 years (1871–1918).
When Ralph Hodgson was born, Wilfred Campbell was about 11.
Ralph Hodgson was about 47 when Wilfred Campbell died.
About 5,459 km separate
Darlington, County Durham, England from
Newmarket, Ontario, Canada.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Ralph Hodgson:
darlington, minerva, ohio, the bull, the last blackbird, poems, the song of honour, eve, time, you old gipsy man.
Wilfred Campbell:
confederation poets, canadian literature, lake huron, wiarton, ottawa, the mother, snowflakes and sunbeams, lake lyrics and other poems.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.