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.
John Stuart Blackie
Strickland Gillilan
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Stuart Blackie entered the world on a bright summer day, 28 July 1809, in a modest house on Charlotte Street in Glasgow, Scotland. The eldest son of Alexander Blackie, a Kelso-born banker who would later manage the Commercial Bank in Aberdeen, and his wife Helen Stodart, the boy was born into a family of solid middle-class respectability amid the bustling industrial heart of Scotland. His early years were marked…
“A man should know something of everything and everything of something.”
Strickland Gillilan was born on 21 September 1869 in Jackson County, Ohio, a region whose rural rhythms, small-town sociability, and vigorous political culture supplied much of the material from which he would make a career. He died on 25 April 1954 in Baltimore, Maryland, after a long life spent as a journalist, lecturer, humorist, versifier, and public entertainer. In the literary histories that privilege modernism…
“Evidently you are under the impression that I do this work for the fun I get out of hearing me.”
About 5,837 km separate Abbotsford, Scotland from Jackson County, Ohio, 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.
John Stuart Blackie: glasgow, aberdeen, eliza wyld, thomas carlyle, goethe's faust, aeschylus, angels holy, lyrical poems. Strickland Gillilan: jackson county, baltimore, the reading mother, including finnigin, sunshine and awkwardness, humorist, newspaper-minded poet, public entertainer.
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.
John Stuart Blackie: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder. Strickland Gillilan: Joy, Wonder, Irony.
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