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
Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.
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.”
In the shadowed corridors of early twentieth-century American literature, where the voices of African American poets were just beginning to echo with unprecedented force, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. stands as a luminous yet fleeting figure—a young man whose brief span of years belied the depth of his insight and the innovative spark of his artistry. Born on September 2, 1895, in Louisville, Kentucky, and passing away on…
About 1,038 km separate Rutherford, New Jersey, USA from Louisville, Kentucky, 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.
William Carlos Williams: rutherford, new jersey, no ideas but in things, ezra pound, h.d., imagism, the young housewife, the red wheelbarrow. Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.: louisville kentucky, tuberculosis, the band of gideon and other lyrics, on the fields of france, florence olivia, fisk university, harlem renaissance, joseph seamon cotter sr..
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. Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.: Spirituality, Wonder, Anger.
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