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.
Yone Noguchi
Eva Gore-Booth
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 annals of literary history, few figures occupy as singular a position as Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who dared to write primarily in English during an era when such a choice seemed almost inconceivable. Born Yonejiro Noguchi on December 8, 1875, in the coastal town of Tsushima near Nagoya, Japan, he would become a pioneering voice in cross-cultural literature, a man who walked between East and West with rema…
“The true seeker of truth never sees truth, because he is truth itself.”
Eva Selina Laura Gore-Booth was born on 22 May 1870 at Lissadell House, the great neo-classical estate overlooking Sligo Bay in north-west Ireland, and died in London on 30 June 1926. She was a poet, dramatist, essayist, spiritual seeker, trade-union ally, campaigner for women’s suffrage, and one half of one of the most enduring partnerships in the history of British and Irish reform. Her name was long overshadowed b…
“One sometimes thinks that the whole art of party politics is to dress shop windows with beautiful motives and noble aims so as to take in the public and keep them quiet while they are carrying out wholesale robberies and murders in the safe seclusion of Government Offices and Departments.”
About 9,522 km separate Tsushima, Aichi, Japan from Lissadell House, County Sligo, Ireland. 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.
Yone Noguchi: tsushima, nagoya, keio university, joaquin miller, seen and unseen, the american diary of a japanese girl, from the eastern sea, the pilgrimage. Eva Gore-Booth: lissadell house, sligo bay, esther roper, women's suffrage, the sorrowful princess, the one and the many, irish literary revival, anglo-irish protestant.
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.
Yone Noguchi: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Eva Gore-Booth: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.
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