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
Max Ehrmann
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 noisy time has slipped away even gracefully at Kyoto.”
Max Ehrmann was born on 26 September 1872 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died there on 9 September 1945, seventeen days before his seventy-third birthday. He is remembered almost everywhere as the author of “Desiderata,” the compact prose poem beginning, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” but that single work represents only the most widely circulated part of a long, earnest, and sometimes overlooked literary life…
“Let me drive out of myself the universal madness to be elsewhere in search of the joy of life, for the joy of life resides within oneself.”
About 10,560 km separate Tsushima, Aichi, Japan from Terre Haute, Indiana, 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.
Yone Noguchi: tsushima, nagoya, keio university, joaquin miller, seen and unseen, the american diary of a japanese girl, from the eastern sea, the pilgrimage. Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius.
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. Max Ehrmann: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace.
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