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
Louis Untermeyer
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…
“I can confidently and in soberness declare that Wagner is a colossal fraud.”
In the sprawling landscape of twentieth-century American letters, few figures cast as long or as peculiar a shadow as Louis Untermeyer. Born on October 1, 1885, in New York City, and dying ninety-two years later on December 18, 1977, in Newtown, Connecticut, Untermeyer occupied a unique position in American cultural life. He was not primarily remembered as a great poet himself, though he published volumes of verse. H…
“Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.”
About 16,672 km separate Melbourne, Victoria, Australia from New York City, New York, 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. Louis Untermeyer: new york city, newtown, connecticut, modern american poetry, harriet monroe, ezra pound, t.s. eliot, carl sandburg, robert frost.
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. Louis Untermeyer: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.
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