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
Madison Julius Cawein
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…
“The human memory is not to be trusted too far.”
Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 March 1865, at the unsettled close of the Civil War, and died there on 8 December 1914, not yet fifty years old. During his lifetime he was among the best-known American poets of his generation, a writer praised by influential editors, admired in Britain as well as the United States, and affectionately called the “Keats of Kentucky.” After his death, howev…
About 1,282 km separate Providence, Rhode Island, USA from Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Shared ground: United States.
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. Madison Julius Cawein: louisville, keats of kentucky, blooms of the berry, kentucky poems, edmund clarence stedman, gertrude foster mckelvey, myth and romance, intimations of the beautiful.
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. Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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