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.
William Barnes
Adelaide Crapsey
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 gentle folds of Dorset's Blackmore Vale, where the River Stour meanders through meadows fringed with ancient oaks and the air hums with the songs of larks and the lowing of cattle, a voice arose that would forever capture the heartbeat of rural England. William Barnes, born on February 22, 1801, at Rushay Farm in the hamlet of Bagber near Sturminster Newton, emerged from humble farming stock to become one of t…
“Nature is the best school of art.”
In the autumn of 1914, as the Great War began tearing Europe apart, a young American poet lay dying in a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Adelaide Crapsey was only thirty-six years old, and though she had published little during her lifetime, she had invented a new poetic form that would outlive her by generations. The cinquain, her creation, distilled the essence of imagist poetry into five crystalline lines, e…
“Scansion isolates, for the sake of analysis, the basic metrical units of verse—feet; the same analytical scrutiny must, I believe, be given to the basic phonetic units of speech.”
About 5,220 km separate Bagber, Dorset, England from Saranac Lake, 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.
William Barnes: dorset, blackmore vale, rural life in the dorset dialect, julia miles, thomas hardy, the honest thief, hwomely rhymes, my orcha'd in linden lea. Adelaide Crapsey: saranac lake, cinquain, imagist poetry, algernon sidney crapsey, vassar college, smith college, november night, the warning.
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.
William Barnes: Peace, Joy, Tenderness. Adelaide Crapsey: Sorrow, Despair, Wonder.
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