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.
Sadakichi Hartmann
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.
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“It was Whistler who proved that art was synonymous with hard work.”
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…
“I have hoped rather to accent in these T'ang masterpieces the human and universal qualities by which they have endured.”
About 11,493 km separate Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan 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.
Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed. 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.
Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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