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.
Mark Van Doren
Witter Bynner
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Mark Van Doren came into the world on June 13, 1894, in the small farming community of Hope, Illinois, the fourth of five sons born to Dr. Charles Lucius Van Doren, a dedicated country doctor of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Eudora Ann Butz, a woman of formidable spirit who had once delivered mail on horseback across the open prairies. The Van Doren household pulsed with the rhythms of rural life—plowing fields, tendi…
“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“Whenever possible, I have avoided phraseology which, natural and familiar in Chinese, would be exotic or quaint in English.”
About 1,181 km separate Hope, Illinois, USA from Brooklyn, New York, 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.
Mark Van Doren: hope, illinois, urband, carl van doren, dorothy graffe, spring thunder, jonathan gentry, a winter diary, pulitzer prize. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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.
Mark Van Doren: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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