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.
Charles Williams
Ernest Hemingway
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…
“The act of love is an act of knowledge.”
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb west of Chicago, and died on 2 July 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. He became one of the most recognizable writers of the twentieth century: novelist, short-story master, journalist, war correspondent, celebrity, sportsman, and, in his earliest publications, a poet. His name came to signify a style as much as a body of work. Hemingway…
“If it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”
About 6,362 km separate Islington, London, England from Oak Park, 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.
Charles Williams: st albans, oxford university, florence conway, c.s. lewis, t.s. eliot, the silver stair, war in heaven, descent into hell. Ernest Hemingway: oak park, ketchum, agnes von kurowsky, hadley richardson, pauline pfeiffer, lost generation, the sun also rises, a farewell to arms.
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.
Charles Williams: Tenderness, Longing, Joy. Ernest Hemingway: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.