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
Charles Williams
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…
“I must express myself, but always completely incomplete.”
On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…
“This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.”
About 5,570 km separate Rutherford, New Jersey, USA from Islington, London, 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.
William Carlos Williams: rutherford, new jersey, no ideas but in things, ezra pound, h.d., imagism, the young housewife, the red wheelbarrow. Charles Williams: st albans, oxford university, florence conway, c.s. lewis, t.s. eliot, the silver stair, war in heaven, descent into hell.
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. Charles Williams: Tenderness, Longing, Joy.
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