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
Ford Madox Hueffer
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…
“Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected.”
Ford Madox Hueffer, who later became Ford Madox Ford, was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, then a semi-rural district on the edge of London, and died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. He was one of the most energetic and consequential literary figures of the transition from late Victorian culture to modernism: a novelist, poet, memoirist, critic, editor, propagandist, literary theorist, and tireless ad…
“For it is a mistake to think that what looks like the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling.”
About 5,324 km separate Providence, Rhode Island, USA from Merton, Surrey, 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. Ford Madox Hueffer: merton, ford madox brown, the brown owl, the questions at the well, the fifth queen trilogy, the good soldier, joseph conrad, the english review.
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. Ford Madox Hueffer: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.
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