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
Sir John Davies
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.”
Sir John Davies, born on 16 April 1569 and dying on 8 December 1626, was one of the most unusually gifted figures of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart world: a poet of intellectual elegance, a lawyer of formidable technical ability, a parliamentarian, an administrator of colonial Ireland, and a man whose life repeatedly exposed the tension between self-command and ambition. His literary reputation rests principal…
“A barbarous country is not so easily conquered as a civil.”
About 85 km separate Newport, Wales from Tisbury, Wiltshire, England. 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. Sir John Davies: tisbury, chicksgrove, orchestra, nosce teipsum, queen's college oxford, middle temple, edmund spenser, christopher marlowe.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing. Sir John Davies: Joy, Wonder, Peace.
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