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.
Leonard Bacon
Alfred Austin
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Leonard Bacon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, translator, and critic, was a figure whose life and work embodied the enduring power of traditional verse to illuminate the absurdities, adventures, and quiet profundities of the human condition. Born at the close of the nineteenth century and passing in the middle of the tumultuous twentieth, he navigated an era of literary upheaval with a steadfast commitment…
“I knew I wanted to write poetry and nothing but poetry.”
Alfred Austin was born on 30 May 1835 at Headingley, then a village just outside Leeds in Yorkshire, and died on 2 June 1913 at Ashford, Kent. For seventeen years, from 1896 until his death, he held the conspicuous and difficult office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Yet his name has endured less securely than those of the poets who preceded and surrounded him. To later readers, Austin has often appeared chie…
“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
About 5,369 km separate Syracuse, New York, USA from Leeds, Yorkshire, 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.
Leonard Bacon: solvay, new york, peace dale, rhode island, sunderland capture, pulitzer prize, the scrannel pipe, autolycus, montana cattle trails, eureka ranch. Alfred Austin: headingley, leeds, poet laureate, the garden that i love, the tower of babel, savonarola, stonyhurst college, lord salisbury.
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.
Leonard Bacon: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Alfred Austin: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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