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.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
A.E.Housman
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 shadowed streets of Providence, Rhode Island, where colonial spires pierced the New England sky like fingers reaching toward indifferent stars, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890. This unassuming city, with its cobblestone lanes and whispering ghosts of history, would become both cradle and canvas for a man whose poetry and prose would forever alter the landscape of American literature. Love…
“Never have a wonder taken for granted.”
Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…
“If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him.”
About 5,168 km separate Providence, Rhode Island, USA from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. 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.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft: providence, rhode island, cosmic horror, whipple van buren phillips, the crime of the century, to a youth, fungi from yuggoth, sonia haft greene. A.E.Housman: fockbury, bromsgrove, moses jackson, a shropshire lad, loveliest of trees, to an athlete dying young, when i was one-and-twenty, classical scholar.
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.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Despair, Sorrow, Fear. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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