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.
Walter J. Turner
Franklin P. Adams
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 pantheon of early twentieth-century poetry, certain names blaze with enduring brilliance while others flicker in the margins of literary history, their contributions underappreciated or nearly forgotten. Walter James Redfern Turner, born on October 13, 1884, in South Melbourne, Australia, belongs to this latter category—a poet, critic, and cultural polymath whose work once commanded the admiration of W.B. Yeat…
“It is futile to declaim vaguely against all popular music.”
Franklin Pierce Adams, known almost everywhere in print by the compact and memorable signature “F. P. A.,” was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 15 November 1881, and died in New York City on 23 March 1960. During the first half of the twentieth century, he became one of America’s most recognizable newspaper humorists, a poet of urbane light verse, an editor, anthologist, critic, and central presence in the literary soci…
“Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.”
About 15,573 km separate Melbourne, Victoria, Australia from Chicago, Illinois, 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.
Walter J. Turner: south melbourne, w.b. yeats, delphine marguerite dubuis, the hunter and other poems, romance, georgian poetry, bloomsbury, siegfried sassoon. Franklin P. Adams: chicago, new york city, f. p. a., baseball's sad lexicon, the conning tower, algonquin round table, in cupid's court, tobogganing on parnassus.
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.
Walter J. Turner: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow. Franklin P. Adams: Irony, Longing, Sorrow.
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