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.
W. H. Davies
John Drinkwater
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“I go to Life and Nature for my own ideas, and have no need of books.”
John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…
“The decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.”
About 206 km separate Newport, Wales from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.
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.
W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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