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.
Gerald Gould
Mark Twain
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 landscape of early twentieth-century English poetry, Gerald Gould occupies a curious position—too well-known to have been forgotten entirely, yet too overlooked to claim his rightful place in the literary canon. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1885 and raised in Norwich, Gould lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, a time when the certainties of the Victorian age gave way to the…
“Instinct, as Falstaff said, is a great matter; but it is not the whole.”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who became Mark Twain, was born on 30 November 1835 in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, and died on 21 April 1910 in Redding, Connecticut. Few American writers have occupied so many roles in the national imagination: printer, river pilot, prospector, newspaper correspondent, lecturer, novelist, travel writer, social critic, entrepreneur, public celebrity, and, in a less frequently emph…
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
About 6,631 km separate Scarborough, England from Florida, Missouri, 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.
Gerald Gould: norwich, barbara ayrton, georgian poet, lyrics, an essay on the nature of lyric, united suffragists, men's league for women's suffrage, the happy tree and other poems. Mark Twain: florida, missouri, redding, connecticut, halley's comet, olivia langdon, the adventures of tom sawyer, adventures of huckleberry finn, the gilded age, the celebrated jumping frog of calaveras county.
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.
Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Mark Twain: Tenderness, Peace, Longing.
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