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.
William Carlos Williams
R. Williams Parry
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Carlos Williams was born on 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, and died there on 4 March 1963. Few American writers made such a compelling argument, through both their lives and their art, that poetry could be found not in a remote ideal realm but in the streets outside one’s door, in a patient’s anxious face, in a backyard garden, in a refrigerator, or beside a muddy chicken yard. He was a physicia…
“Not after the establishment, but speaking straight ahead.”
Robert Williams Parry, known in literature as R. Williams Parry, was born on 6 March 1884 at Talysarn in the Nantlle Valley of Caernarfonshire, north-west Wales, and died on 4 January 1956. He became one of the most admired Welsh-language poets of the twentieth century, though he was never a prolific author in the ordinary commercial sense. His reputation rests instead upon a relatively small body of exceptionally fi…
About 5,238 km separate Rutherford, New Jersey, USA from Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales. 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.
William Carlos Williams: rutherford, new jersey, no ideas but in things, ezra pound, h.d., imagism, the young housewife, the red wheelbarrow. R. Williams Parry: talysarn, nantlle valley, yr haf a cherddi eraill, the summer and other poems, y llwynog, the fox, cynghanedd, welsh-language poetry.
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.
William Carlos Williams: Tenderness, Wonder, Peace. R. Williams Parry: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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